Business Daily has lost yet another reporter after Muthoki Mumo left Nation Centre on Wednesday barely a week after it was reported that senior reporter Mugambi Mutegi was also on his way out to join the Competition Authority.
Though she did not indicate where she is headed to, her goodbye letter implies she could be joining the public relations world. “This email is also fair warning to expect a call from me, bothering you about one thing or another, in the near future. Kenya is small and Nairobi is even smaller so you have no chance of avoiding me…” she wrote.
Muthoki was previously a freelance journalist before joining NMG in November 2011. Muthoki used to write on on technology and telecommunications. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism. She also holds a Master of Arts degree in media and globalisation jointly awarded by the University of Hamburg and Aarhus University.
She also had specialised knowledge of economic affairs and the integration of the East African Community.
Business Daily – or BD as it is called in media circles – has been hard hit in recent months, losing promising young talent to the competition, government, PR agencies and the corporate world. The exodus has left its editors in a fix especially given the fact that there is a short supply of business writers in Kenya’s media.
Though Muthoki is not a beneficiary of the in-house training programme, BD has been spending a fortune training young journalists only for them to be picked up by mostly PR and communication agencies. With no let up in the exits, Nation Media Group may reconsider its in-house training of writers at its Media Lab, which was in 2016 moved to Aga Khan University.
Standard Inc, the in-house programme at the Standard Group has also been suffering a similar fate.
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About two months ago, BD lost court reporter Brian Wasuna to Radio Africa Group’s Star newspaper, former Reuters writer Kevin Mwanza, who returned to Reuters, and lifestyle writer and data scientist Isabella Mukumu.
Also to leave was Stellar Murumba, the young journalist who broke the Ksh5 billion Afya House mobile clinics scandal, after she landed a job as a project manager at Code for Kenya, a non-partisan civic data and civic technology organisation led by former Nation News Editor Catherine Gicheru.