TIPTOPSTARS

Usually described as Africa in miniature,  Cameroon has more than enough to show in music, cinema, fashion, craft, cuisine. Examples abound. Yet the media, especially the print pay very little attention to this. Cameroonian newspapers are known to have little room for arts and culture news, especially when it is not institutional. There has been a disturbing absence of regular entertainment columns in frontline newspapers published in English, if we must limit the observation to that. Even when stories on showbiz are reported in the papers, they are only sporadically done with no in-depth approach to it,  contary to what would obtain with politics and perhaps sports.

On radio or television, such stories are lined at the bottom of the news menu, usually coming at the close of the newscast. Whether they find an audience at that time is another story on its own.

For quite some time now, there has been an outcry to reverse this phenomenon which does not reflect a country said to be a cultural Eldorado. Even when arts and culture reporters and stakeholders in the entertainment industry have sought lasting solutions, the habit has refused to die so soon.

However, there is silver lining in the dark cloud of entertainment reporting in Cameroon. There has at least been an active revolution happening online, thanks to some entertainment portals. Amongst them is four-year-old www.nexdimempire.com which undoubtedly is one of the leading Cameroonian online publications. Reputed for capturing the attention of a huge audience worldwide, www.nexdimempire.com has become a big market place for Cameroonian showbiz news and sports. Hardly would any Cameroonian showbiz event or celebrity go unnoticed by the site which  can today boast of countless articles, published over the past four years.

Run under the banner of NexDim Empire, an entertainment outfit, www.nexdimempire.com has won a huge reputation for reporting regularly on the contemporary music landscape and the Cameroon’s young movie industry. “NexDim is my window on the Cameroonian entertainment industry,” Terence, an Ohio USA resident told TIPTOPSTARS Editor. The young lover of art and culture who has been away from Cameroon for over a decade now confessed to us that he feels at home each time he logs on www.nexdimempire.com “The site is so rich in content and a big asset to Cameroon’s entertainment industry,” he went further.

Perhaps what makes the NexDim story more exciting is that the outfit goes beyond reporting events. www.nexdimempire.com also plays an admirable promotional role, helping out artists in the areas of advertizing, online sales, marketing, event and concert organization, mass production of CDs, printing of posters, stickers, banners and T-shirt graphic design.

With the indefatigable Steveslil as CEO, NexDim saw the light of day in 2009. The idea had been nursed a year earlier by Njang Stephen Mbu and Mambe Churchill Nanje. “We have a defined objective of instilling the value of creative imagination and throwing light in the music, arts and film industry in Cameroon,” the outfit’s mission statement reads.

Like Terence, hundreds of thousands of NexDim fans including those living in Cameroon are glad they can at least be feed with soft news, even when the politically-inclined hard copy news publications have fail to offer it to the reading public. If you’ve not been on the site yet, you can henceforth become one of its regular visitors by simply clicking on www.nexdimempire.com. That could just be the beginning of a new life in an empire of entertainment, an experience you probably might not have had before. Kudos Steveslil and co.!