Vistanium, 2024

Our first 'serious' year, and what to expect from the rest of it.

Reader, 

Nine months ago, I shared an update about taking this little piece of the internet called Vistanium and making it into something more meaningful. To create a laboratory of curiosities that, at its heart, cares deeply about stories and making things that move us and everyone. 

Today, I'm Throwing Myself Into The Ring

It might feel early, but there’s much more clarity about Vistanium’s core purpose: to find extraordinary people and whip up extraordinary stories with them. Beyond talent, it’s finding people with great aspirations to do work that feels original and pushes the boundaries of the medium they choose a little further. 

Still, the fundamental measure of our success will be how it impacts you, the reader, watcher, or listener. I believe a piece from Vistanium has delivered when it offers you a new perspective on old things, however mundane, or opens you up to entirely new worlds. 

Now, this small space was created a few years ago to explore more ambitious storytelling that conventional channels in Nigeria might not have room for. Not because there’s no appreciation for it but because there just doesn’t appear to be a model to accommodate it.

I understand that; I just refuse to accept it. But I’m not alone in this lack of acceptance. Since July last year, a few dozen people have made commitments—actual paid commitments—to get this thing going. I don’t know what the future holds, but I know that whatever we make of it won’t be possible without them. 

My Vistanium agenda is to make it the place for the best-told stories about the human condition. In the past, Vistanium has mostly felt like a place for me and my collaborators – editors, designers, researchers – with me at the centre of the creative process. But more and more, other people will be the centre of the process as part of a community of practice. There have always been indicators: 

For example, I understand that while I care deeply about telling in-depth stories, I don’t have enough hours in my life to tell all of them. Victor Daniel, for example, was in a much better place to tell the story of a flood that had affected his family.

Going into the future, it will mean even more people at the centre of the creative process. For example,

Aisha Salaudeen

brought her podcasts, I Too Sabi and I Like Girls, into Vistanium. I Like Girls started with her talking, in narrative format, about her episode of being gaslit by doctors for years. And now, 45 episodes later, she’s spoken to dozens of women from about two dozen African countries about what it means to be a woman. 

This weekend, she starts releasing three episodes of a limited series about what it means to be a woman running for public office in Nigeria. You should listen. 

Another Aisha—

Aisha Bello

—is starting a series called Bottom Line, a personal exploration of what’s happening in the world of money and how it’s affecting her Nigerian pocket and yours. Every Sunday at 6pm WAT, she’ll look at some aspect of money in the trends, speak to experts about it, understand what it means, and explain how it affects you, and she’ll deliver it to you jargon-free. 

Fighting For My Bottom Line

A bunch of other stuff are coming this year: 

The features will come, consistently

First, we're establishing a monthly release cadence. Then, towards the end of the year, we’re raising the ambition to establish a weekly features cadence. Last year, you and many others loved A Paystack Friendship so much that it was read almost 20,000 times in less than a week. We’ll look for more.

A Paystack Friendship

While we’re starting the year by working to establish a monthly publishing cadence for our features, we want to close out the year by delivering one per week. That’s ambitious, but it’s also curious. There are a couple of things we’ll be keeping in mind: where the stories are situated and who’s collecting them.

This experiment, as a question, is this: What will it take to find six strong storytellers from across Nigeria and work with them to produce hyperlocal stories with global aspirations? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out.

We’ll take some big swings; crack, crack

We’re building muscle across formats as we go. For example, Aisha has produced over a hundred videos for CNN. But she directed one short film, We Have Bleach, and felt like a rookie again. I did too. That’s coming later this year. 

But perhaps the biggest swing of the year, in scale and stakes, remains Sun and Country, a careful and comprehensive story about the Nigerian Civil War delivered in multiple formats—audio, text, video etc. There’s some last-mile fever there that will be cured with cold water and wads of cash. 

And talking about wads of cash, to pay for all of these, we’re going to be shaking many trees: growing the membership, taking on commissioned work, and exploring whatever means exist.

It’ll be hard, all of it.

Just as I was thinking about how to end this, Kayode, my friend and collaborator of five years, messaged me. He’d been watching an interview with the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who had shared a saying he learned from Peruvians: " Perseverance is where the gods dwell.”

“There’s so much to do,” Kayode said as we discussed a short documentary he co-directed—it’s coming to Vistanium.

He’s right. There’s so much to do, and we’ll do it with vim. Life is so rich; we’ll bear witness, collect pieces of it, and transmit them to everyone for them to see, to hear, and to feel. This, to me, is what storytelling means.

All the progress we’ve made is a result of the effort of our community of backers and the collective brilliance of the editorial team. Thank you for bringing us this far. Let’s go further.