REVEALED: Radio Africa Once Tried To Buy Out The Standard

So I uncovered an old Mindspeak podcast where the co-founders of Radio Africa, William Pike and Patrick Quarcoo talked in-depth about the behind-the-scenes workings of the group. At first, they revealed that Radio Africa makes 600-800 million a year. Then they went into how they think that print media is currently run in a very expensive manner.

William Pike lamented the operations, saying:

“I came to Kenya and we started a paper with Patrick. Why did we want to start it? Like Patrick says, while you want to be creative, you also want to make money. And definitely in the print market, they are hugely profitable. the Nation and the Standard are very, very expensively run organisations.”

Then he dropped the buyout bombshell:

“At one point we tried to take over the Standard. I don’t know whether that’s public knowledge… We came very close to getting control of it about five years ago(2004) but it somehow went wrong. But we studied the insides of these organisations. You could reduce the cost structure of both the Nation and the Standard without a loss in quality. We think there’s a lot of room for a low cost, but high quality newspaper, and that’s what we’re trying to do with the Star.”

To listen to the entire podcast, click here.