I was speaking with Bill, a good friend of mine who is the host of the Peswa podcast, and we were talking about the future of media. Here are some things I shared that I think could be useful for anybody in the media space.
Specifically, we were talking about where business content in Ghana, and potentially the rest of Africa, could go over the next five to ten years.
Now, I don’t consume enough content to claim that nobody is doing these things already. Some people probably are. But I think there’s an opportunity for a few formats to become much more prominent, partly because of how audiences will develop, and partly because of what AI is going to do to the economics of producing content.
For a long time, much of the media we paid attention to sat around news, entertainment, relationships, and popular culture. Then came a growing appetite for business content. People wanted to hear from people who had built something. How did you start? Where did the money come from? What went wrong? How did you keep going?
The dominant format for that has been the founder’s story.
Somebody builds a business, sits across from a host, and tells us how they did it. We get the difficult beginning, the failures, the turning point, and some lessons along the way.
There’s real value in that. Sometimes, before you can do something, you need to see that somebody like you has done it. A story can make a possibility feel available to you.
But something happens when you actually start.
You discover that being inspired to build a business and knowing how to run one are very different things.
You have staff now. Customers owe you money. Somebody you hired isn’t working out. Revenue is growing, but you’re somehow always short of cash. You’re trying to figure out whether to open another branch or fix the one you already have.
At that point, your questions change. And I think there’s a substantial opportunity for business media that grows with those questions.
The first format is operational playbooks.
We’ve heard how you started the company. Now, how does it work?
You’ve been running a business for seven years. What have you learned about recruitment? How do you decide what to pay people? How do you manage stock? What happens when a customer doesn’t pay? How do you know whether a branch is profitable? What did you change when the business became too big for you to supervise everything yourself?
These are the conversations I want to hear more of.
And I want them to get specific. If you changed your recruitment process, show us what changed. What were you doing before? Why wasn’t it working? What do you do now? What have the results been?
There’s a lot of knowledge sitting inside businesses that rarely makes it into public conversation. Sometimes the founder has it. Sometimes it’s the finance manager, the operations lead, or the person who has been keeping the whole place running for fifteen years.
That knowledge is especially valuable when it accounts for the conditions people are actually operating in. Managing a business in Ghana comes with circumstances that a playbook written somewhere else may never consider. Even within Africa, what works in one market may need substantial adjustment in another.
The challenge will be getting people to share enough detail to make the content useful. Some will consider it a trade secret. Some will be uncomfortable discussing mistakes. Some will have legitimate concerns about what employees, customers, or competitors might infer.
Whoever can earn that trust and make those conversations possible will have access to something valuable.
The second format is diagnostics.
Think of it as business therapy.
A business owner sits across from somebody with the experience and judgment to help them understand what’s happening in their business.
They arrive saying, “We have a marketing problem.”
But as the conversation unfolds, you discover that customers are coming in. The problem is that they don’t return. Then you discover why they don’t return. And suddenly, the conversation has moved somewhere the owner wasn’t expecting.
That process is fascinating to watch.
There’s a question at the beginning. There are assumptions to examine. There’s tension when something doesn’t add up. And there’s the possibility of a moment when the person sees their situation differently.
The viewer is learning alongside them. You’re watching somebody think, ask questions, follow a thread, and decide which information matters.
It has the ingredients of a good story, with the added value that somebody watching may recognise the same pattern in their own business.
But this will be hard to do well. A confident person giving advice can look like an expert diagnosing a problem. Those are different capabilities. The format needs somebody who can recognise what they know, what they don’t know, and when another specialist needs to enter the conversation.
I also think the follow-up could become one of its strongest features.
You made a recommendation. The owner tried it. What happened?
Did it work? Did they misunderstand it? Did a different problem emerge? Was the original diagnosis wrong?
That gives the audience a reason to return, and it makes the work much more credible.
The third format is filming the work itself.
This is where business media starts to borrow from reality television and documentary.
What does it actually take to deliver a wedding in Ghana?
Follow the planner from the first meeting to the day itself. Watch the budget discussions, the supplier negotiations, the changes, the team coordination, and the things that inevitably refuse to go according to plan.
There’s a deadline. There are people with competing expectations. There’s money involved. Decisions have consequences. The tension is already there.
Or follow a production company delivering a major concert. A restaurant preparing to open another location. A manufacturer trying to fulfil an important order.
These are businesses, but they’re also human stories.
You get to see how people behave under pressure. Who takes responsibility? Who notices the problem early? What does experience allow somebody to see that everybody else misses?
And you learn an enormous amount almost incidentally, because you’re invested in whether they can pull it off.
This is probably the most demanding of the three formats. You need access over time. You need people willing to let you film when things become uncomfortable. You need a production team that can recognise a story while it’s happening, and an editor who can make sense of everything afterward.
You might spend days filming something that produces ten useful minutes. That difficulty is part of why the result could be distinctive.
Which brings me to the bigger idea underneath all three formats: fidelity to reality.
As AI makes content easier to produce, I think the relationship between media and reality becomes more valuable.
General explanations, polished scripts, business advice, and talking-head videos will become easier to generate. The volume will increase. More of what we see will be interchangeable.
But access to a real business, dealing with a real problem, involving people who have something at stake, is a different kind of asset.
You can generate a convincing account of a difficult decision. Having permission to be in the room when somebody makes it, understanding enough to explain it, and returning to see the consequences requires something more.
It requires relationships. Trust. Judgment. Time.
That’s where I think some of the strongest media businesses will build their advantage.
Of course, pointing a camera at something doesn’t automatically make it truthful. People perform. Reality television can be heavily manufactured. Editing can make a conversation seem more decisive than it was.
So fidelity to reality has to be an editorial commitment. How much of the situation are we allowing the audience to understand? What evidence supports what we’re saying? Are we willing to show an outcome that complicates the story we wanted to tell?
Those questions will matter.
I don’t think founder interviews are going away. There will always be people who need to hear how somebody started. But there are also people who have already started, people who have been operating for decades, and people who simply find the work of building things interesting.
There’s room to serve them much better.
For anybody thinking about the future of business media in Ghana, that’s where I’d be looking: the methods people use, the judgment they exercise, and the work they do when something consequential is on the line.
There are extraordinary stories inside that work. We need to get close enough to see them.