The Newspaper Vendors Association, Abuja chapter, has named LEADERSHIP Newspaper as the Most Improved Newspaper in the country.
The award was given to the paper during this year’s Vendors’ Week and Awards presentation ceremony.
According to the association, whose members are responsible for getting the country’s leading newspapers to the readers, LEADERSHIP has shown remarkable improvement in both content and design in the last one year. Other newspapers were given different categories of awards by the vendors’ association
The association presented the award to the group managing director of LEADERSHIP Newspapers Group, Mr. Azubuike Ishiekwene, who represented the paper’s chairman, Sam Nda Isaiah, at the ceremony held last Thursday.
Receiving the award, Ishiekwene noted that vendors served as a valuable source for newspapers to get accurate and reliable feedback from the reader and remarked that the job of producing a newspaper was incomplete until vendors got the paper to its final destination, which happens to be the reader.
The ceremony coincided with a N100 million fund-raiser to build a secretariat for the vendors in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and to also develop an insurance scheme for the vendors.
The chairman of the Abuja Vendors’ Association, Mr. Evans Oriri, said the new executive body of the association was determined to “attract and ensure a workable insurance policy scheme for the vendors due to the challenges they faced under rain and sun in vending their wares at their respective sales outlets”.
He said, “Vendors can fare better in reducing unemployment rate if the relationship among government, publishers and other stakeholders is substantially improved and the vendors remain accountable in sales remittance, mostly to the publishers via the distributors and sales representatives.”