Misty Bastian's 1999 prescient prediction of the “possibility of a new synthesis, a drawing closer of the electronic world of the brain drain diaspora and the real worlds of both material diasporic experience and Nigerian quotidian life” materialized not just in the emergence of the diasporic citizen media formation that arose from where the guerrilla journalism of the 1990s left off. It also emerged in the vibrant domestic, digital-native media formation it spawned during the early 2010s. Inspired by the success, popularity, impact, and promise of the diasporic citizen online media, an abundance of home-based online news sites emerged starting in 2011. Many of them mimic Sahara Reporters’ erstwhile editorial template. At least one of these online-only domestic news sites matches, and sometimes outmatches, Sahara Reporters in its earliest form. Most of them, nevertheless, have not been able to replicate Sahara Reporters’ success and seem condemned to linger on the margins of the Nigerian journalistic landscape. However, a measure of their rootedness in the Nigerian news media landscape can be gleaned from the fact that a visible professional association, the Online Publishers Association of Nigeria, now exists for Nigerian digital-native journalists at home and in the diaspora.

Premium Times is a home-based online news site that shook the foundations of Nigerian journalism and that rivaled the earlier incarnation of Sahara Reporters in impact and hard-hitting investigative reporting. It was established in 2011 by home-based, professional, award-winning investigative journalists, some of whom were associated with the guerrilla journalism of the 1990s. According to Alexa Rank, from 2017 through 2019, Premium Times was among the top 40 most visited websites in Nigeria and the country's fourth most visited news site, topped only by Punch, Vanguard, and the Daily Post. It had edged out Sahara Reporters from the fourth spot in news traffic by 2018, in large part because Omoyele Sowore, Sahara Reporters’ editor in chief, devoted more time to his presidential campaign than he did to his website. Further, as a consequence of Sowore's relocation to Nigeria and his obsession with his presidential run, the site ceased to be the trove of sensational muckraking journalism that it had become famous for. For a long time, as will be shown in subsequent sections of this chapter, Premium Times was the unrivaled go-to site for exposés of malfeasance in government, although by 2019 it had lost its investigative vibrancy.