Chief Executive Officer abd Theorist-In-Chief, Sundiata Post, Dr Max Amuchie, on Sunday announced the launch of the Sundiata Post Model, a pioneering institutional framework that positions an independent African newsroom as a genuine knowledge-producing institution within the global information and research ecosystem.
The framework reimagines the newsroom as a knowledge institution capable of systematically generating original analytical constructs for global scholarly and policy conversations.
Conceived and articulated by Dr. Max Amuchie through his weekly syndicated column, “The Sunday Stew’, the Model codifies how an independent newsroom can systematically generate original analytical constructs that shape journalism, scholarship, and policy discourse in the digital age.
Framing the Model: From Newsroom to Knowledge Institution
The Sundiata Post Model is defined as an institutional framework in which an independent newsroom systematically integrates journalism, original research, conceptual innovation, and scholarly dissemination to generate original analytical constructs that contribute to public understanding, academic inquiry, and policy discourse.
Emerging from the 91-day Three-Month Sprint that yielded three macro-theoretical constructs—the Insecurity Triad, the Trinity of State Decay (TSD), and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—the Model demonstrates that, under the right institutional conditions, a newsroom can function as both a media platform and a knowledge institution.
“The question that increasingly confronts journalism in the twenty-first century is not only how to report the world, but what journalism itself can become,” said Dr. Max Amuchie, Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO & Theorist-In-Chief at Sundiata Post and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). “The Sundiata Post Model is my attempt to answer that question through practice: showing that a newsroom can generate original frameworks that travel from journalism into scholarship, policy, and algorithmic knowledge systems.”
An Emerging Interdisciplinary Body of Work
Within a relatively short period, Sundiata Post has developed four interlinked constructs that collectively illustrate the Model in practice: the Insecurity Triad, the Trinity of State Decay (TSD), the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), and the Sundiata Post Model itself. Together, these constructs form an interdisciplinary body of work situated at the intersection of political science, international relations, sociology, security studies, quantitative social science, and media studies, showing how media-based inquiry can produce concepts that are methodologically rigorous and globally relevant.
“The real story of the Three-Month Sprint was never only that three constructs were developed in 91 days,” Dr. Amuchie noted. “It was that an independent newsroom had quietly evolved an institutional framework capable of systematically producing original ideas, and of documenting and disseminating them in ways that meet scholarly and policy standards.”
Connecting Journalism to Global Research Ecosystems
A key implication of the Sundiata Post Model is its insistence that journalism and academic knowledge production need not exist in separate institutional silos. Through initiatives such as the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU), the publication of working papers, engagement with scholarly repositories, and participation in international research networks, Sundiata Post is building structured pathways for ideas generated in the newsroom to enter global scholarly and policy conversations.
This trajectory is reflected in Dr. Amuchie’s appointment as an Expert Member and Peer Reviewer at ScienceOpen, the Berlin-based global research discovery and scholarly publishing platform that connects researchers, publishers, universities, and research institutions across disciplines. While based on his scholarly profile and publication record, the appointment underscores the permeability between journalism and the academy that the Sundiata Post Model seeks to advance, demonstrating that original ideas developed within an independent newsroom can participate credibly in global research ecosystems when supported by rigorous methodology and systematic documentation.
Defining a New Role for the Newspaper Column
The Sundiata Post Model also invites a reconsideration of the newspaper column in the digital age, moving it beyond commentary and opinion into a platform for systematic inquiry and conceptual innovation.
“The Sunday Stew’, Dr. Amuchie’s weekly column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society in Nigeria, Africa, and the wider Global South, evolved from a space for reflection into a site of knowledge production where analytical constructs are developed, refined, and introduced into broader academic and policy debates.
“In much of its history, column writing has been associated largely with commentary and persuasion,” Dr. Amuchie explained. “Our experience shows that a column can become a disciplined research platform that generates frameworks like the Insecurity Triad, the Trinity of State Decay, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index, and then carries them into scholarly and policy conversations at national, continental, and global levels.”
Algorithmic Identity and the Need for Authoritative Definition
The decision to formally introduce and define the Sundiata Post Model at this time was reinforced by the growing algorithmic visibility of the concept in digital knowledge systems. As discussions around the Three-Month Sprint series unfolded, artificial intelligence systems and search algorithms began identifying “Sundiata Post Model” as a distinct concept and generating summaries and inferences based on scattered publications, effectively giving the Model a nascent digital identity.
“Once a concept enters algorithmic knowledge systems, it begins to acquire a digital identity that shapes how researchers, students, journalists, and policy practitioners first encounter it,” Dr. Amuchie said. “Defining the Sundiata Post Model authoritatively is therefore essential, rather than allowing its meaning to be shaped entirely by algorithmic interpretations.”
Implications for African and Global Journalism
For mainstream media and newsrooms in Africa and beyond, the Sundiata Post Model offers a concrete illustration of how institutional design can enable journalism to participate in the production, circulation, and evaluation of knowledge, not merely the reporting of events. The Model suggests that an independent newsroom in Africa can develop original frameworks that inform security analysis, state theory, and sovereignty metrics in the Global South, while meeting the evidentiary and methodological standards required by academic and policy communities.
“If the twentieth century established the newsroom as society’s information institution, the twenty-first century may yet establish it as a knowledge institution,” Dr. Amuchie observed. “The Sundiata Post Model is offered as a contribution to that broader conversation: a proposition to be tested, refined, and challenged through practice, scholarly engagement, and policy application.”
The introductory essay, “The Sundiata Post Model (1): Where the Newsroom Meets the Knowledge Institution,” marks the first instalment in a three-part series that will unpack the Model’s institutional architecture and explore the conditions required for long-term sustainability. Subsequent parts will examine how editorial processes, research protocols, documentation standards, and economic models must evolve if journalism is to operate as a genuine knowledge institution that is intellectually rigorous, institutionally coherent, and economically viable.
Like any institutional framework, the Sundiata Post Model is presented as a proposition to be examined and refined, rather than as a closed doctrine. Sundiata Post invites scholars, journalists, media executives, policy practitioners, and research institutions to engage with the Model—whether by adopting, adapting, extending, or critically interrogating it—as part of a wider effort to rethink the future of journalism in the digital and algorithmic age.
