When on 18 March this year the Daily Nation, one of Africa's biggest and most successful independent newspapers, celebrated its 50th anniversary, Charles Onyango Obbo, a columnist for the Nairobi, Kenya, paper, wrote, "It has mostly been hell on earth for the African media for most of these 50 years. In fact the freest period for the African media generally has been the 15-year period between 1990 and 2005."

At independence in 1960 most newspapers were privately owned, organs either of the nationalist political movements and parties or of businesses mostly established by European investors.

But by 1970 most newspapers of any signifi­cance across the continent were government-owned. Any newspaper expressing independent editorial attitudes was censored, banned or so controlled that most of the owners gave up publishing.  One man, the Liberian journalist Kenneth Best, started the first daily in both Liberia and Gambia in the 1980s. Mr. Best eventually had to flee both countries.  [read more]

If you’re in downtown Nairobi before the 4th of August, be sure to pop in to the Barber Q Hair Studio and get yourself a free head massage. The studio is on the 2nd Floor of El-Roi Plaza, close to the Odeon Cinema. This is just one example of the thousands of snippets of information that are at the heart of Mocality, a free-to-list, hyper-local mobile business directory in Nairobi, Kenya.

Mocality offers a free business suite of tools to all listed businesses, such as the ability to upload customer mobile numbers into the Mocality platform, a free mobile website and 400 free SMSes each month to message their customers about new products and promotions.

Mocality’s CEO Stefan Magdalinksi sees Mocality as becoming “the largest, most successful, business directory in sub-Saharan Africa by expanding the market via internet technology to include millions of businesses that previously never appeared in a directory, offline or online”.  [read more]

I’ve been on the Mo Ibrahim Governance for Development in Africa (GDIA) Fellowship at the University of London for the past two months, but, trust me, I’ve kept a close tab on events in Nigeria. As I was putting finishing touches to my research, news broke that President Goodluck Jonathan had reversed his decision to withdraw Nigeria from international football for two years. At first, I said: “Another Yar’Adua is born!” The late President Yar’Adua was popularly known for changing his mind every second.But, on a second thought, I was pleased that Jonathan changed his decision. His spokesman, Mr. Ima Niboro, said the president decided to reverse the decision because of the opinions expressed by a broad range of Nigerians on the social networking website, facebook. Why was I pleased? It helped my research! Rather than condemn the president, I would rather say “good move”. It is always good to listen to public opinion on some issues – public debate could be very useful. Read more

The fifth annual Digital Citizen’s Indaba (DCI) [www.dcindaba.com], held on July 7 at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, will draw together citizens, advocates, bloggers and activists to discuss how new media can revolutionise development work and give a voice to the unheard or silenced. This year’s theme, Africa’s underdevelopment: Digital Citizens. Talk Back, will explore citizen media and the exploitation of natural resources, disasters, climate change and mega events. The DCI is a project of the Highway Africa Conference www.highwayafrica.com which takes place on July 5 and 6. Our theme will be explored through three topical panels entitled, ‘Natural Resource Exploitation’, ‘Citizen Media on Disasters and Climate Change’, and ‘Mega Events—Whose Voices are Heard?’. The panels will involve activists who use new media to make their voices heard, or those who play a supporting role in development work. The Indaba has attracted the attention of major international figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who will give the closing addresses for both DCI and Highway Africa. Read more

Journalists are having to get used to working in an "attention economy", where the proliferation of new media platforms has created an increasingly bitter struggle for smaller and smaller slices of audiences' attention. Having spent around eight months working in the office of the Reuters editor for ethics, innovation and standards, Wits and Columbia graduate Jackie Bischof considers the place of ethics in the brave new world of journalism.

It was impossible to write this column in one sitting. In front of a computer, my attention is spread across several browser tabs, automated news aggregators and rolling applications like Tweetdeck and iGoogle, instant messaging systems, and the hundreds of stories summarized and condensed into newsletters that land in my five e-mail inboxes throughout the day. I’m frequently tempted to turn to paper, pen and an Internet-free zone – a forest perhaps?

We’re living in a so-called attention economy , where the fight for attention has changed the way journalists report the news. Attention is in short supply. Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian writes that , on average, readers spend around 70 seconds reading news online a day compared to 25 minutes poring over a physical newspaper. This finding - terrifying to journalists - was cited recently in an Atlantic article on "How to Save the News ". [read more]

Citizen participation, access to information and action usher in much needed reforms. The process to engage citizens is easy to describe but hard to achieve. So how do you grab and keep the attention of community stakeholders and keep them informed? This week’s answer is “Participedia.”

"Participedia is a wiki-based platform with an ambitious goal: strengthening democracy around the world. The website consists of a user-generated library of examples and methods of participatory governance, public deliberation, and collaborative public action. From citizen involvement in budgeting to oversight groups that ensure better health care and social service delivery, government initiatives that encourage democratic participation demonstrate powerful results." Launched in 2009, Participedia is a project of Stanford University, Harvard University, and the University of British Columbia. Participedia uses the same wiki platform as Wikipedia except they use it to tell democratic reform stories. [read more]

With a few developments in recent times, Nigeria is still setting the pace in technological developments in Africa and indeed the Middle East and African emerging markets. This is as Nigeria can now join a few other countries of the world to provide its citizens the opportunity of watching the 2010 World Cup LIVE broadcasts on their cell phones.

This opportunity was facilitated by a recent partnership between DStv Mobile, Nokia and MTN Nigeria to push the boundaries of entertainment by making compelling live TV available to Nigerians on their mobile devices. [read more]

Until Twitter came along and blew the lid off news coverage of the Iranian elections last year, many of us were scratching our heads wondering just how social media could help journalism to be more interesting. Sure, Facebook helped you market a story to your buddies and you could pick up a story or two on Twitter but what else was there? Then the Iranians, armed with cellphones, beat the pants off the international news organisations covering the June protests in Tehran and we all sat up and took notice. In South Africa, social media also steals the spotlight from traditional media from time to time. Here are my favourite examples: [read more]

There are 40 names on this year’s list of Predators of Press Freedom – 40 politicians, government officials, religious leaders, militias and criminal organisations that cannot stand the press, treat it as an enemy and directly attack journalists. They are powerful, dangerous, violent and above the law. Many of them were already on last year’s list. In Latin America, there is no change in the four major sources of threats and violence against journalists: drug traffickers, the Cuban dictatorship, FARC and paramilitary groups. Africa has also seen few changes. But power relationships have been evolving in the Middle East and Asia. [read more]

I was passing through Accra recently and while walking through the lobby of the hotel was stopped by a poster for a regional conference on Freedom of Information and at the same time ran into several colleagues and old friends. It was an interesting exercise to be very aware of an issue and personalities but be on the outside looking. The conference was well attended, drawn by the start power of former US president Jimmy Carter, his center and high level activist and political figures from Africa. The Carter Center which has been at the forefront of this work is able to draw attention to and raise the profile of the issue in West Africa.

But what did it all mean to local people? When I asked Ghanaians working or staying at the hotel about the conference, there was very high recognition but mostly it was linked to former President Carter. But the issue drew little recognition or excitement. Ghana did announce that after years of languishing on the books an FOI bill would be introduced into Parliament. But to the people outside of the conference this would have little impact on their daily lives. Their worries were much more about food, shelter, safety, schooling and the actions of the government in power on their lives. [read more]

WRITING crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides,” a monk wrote in the margins of a manuscript he was copying in a medieval monastery. Printing had much more evil potential. It was attacked on aesthetic grounds. Shortly after Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of movable type, a great copyist, Vaspasiano, said “a gentleman would never foul his library with a roughly inked, manufactured book on coarse rag paper”. More seriously, those who had controlled the flow of information — notably the church — feared losing their hold on people’s minds and beliefs.

As late as the 1660s, England’s chief book censor, Sir Roger L’Estrange, was asking “whether more mischief than advantage were not occasioned to the Christian world by the invention of typography”. Poet Andrew Marvell wrote: “O Printing! How thou has disturbed the peace of Mankind!”   [read more]

Johannesburg — SA's first bilingual "m-novel" - a novel written for publication via cellphones - was so successful that sequels would be released this year, the Shuttleworth Foundation, which published the novel, said last week. In two months 63 000 people - 28 000 of them teenagers - signed up to read the m-novel, Kontax, written in English and Xhosa, after the launch in November. The novel, written by a "mobilist" called Sam Wilson, describes the experiences of a crew of young graffiti mural artists and their search for a girl who goes missing in suspicious circumstances. [read more]

In a meeting last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the African Union Commission (AUC) and the European Commission (EC) announced that they no longer intend to create a Pan African Media Observatory (PAMO) due to opposition from the media community, and African and international organisations - including a number of IFEX members, reports Media Rights Agenda (MRA). PAMO was proposed by the AUC and the EC in 2009 to mediate disputes within the media and enforce professional standards and conduct for the media. But the project ignored the reality of brutal state repression of the press as it was set up to give African leaders control over the media environment, reports MRA. MRA and other IFEX members at the meeting, including the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), the Media Institute of Southern African (MISA), the Center for Media Studies and Peace Building (CEMESP), the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and ARTICLE 19, rejected presentations of the PAMO project.

[Read more]

In an unprecedented move a few dozen bloggers lead by Sipho Hlongwane have posted a message condemning Floyd Shivambu’s alleged intimidation of journalists. Here’s the rolling blog: Last week, shocking revelations concerning the activities of the ANC Youth League spokesperson Nyiko Floyd Shivambu came to the fore. According to a letter published in various news outlets, a complaint was laid by 19 political journalists with the Secretary General of the ANC, against Shivambu. This complaint letter detailed attempts by Shivambu to leak a dossier to certain journalists, purporting to expose the money laundering practices of Dumisani Lubisi, a journalist at the City Press. The letter also detailed the intimidation that followed when these journalists refused to publish these revelations.[ Read more http://fesmedia.org/african-media-news/detail/datum/2010/03/24/-651043ccb3/ ]

Media freedom is not only a fundamental right but also a basic necessity for a multi-party democracy to thrive and blossom. President Robert Mugabe was dead right last Thursday when he told editors from various stables of the need for an open media if the inalienable right to a free press is to be upheld. Mugabe’s words on the media should now be put into action as a matter of urgency to exhibit his government’s sincerity on reforms and to build a nation whose foundation is copper-bottomed in an unfettered press.

The first step is for the newly constituted Zimbabwe Media Commission to immediately set up shop. It needs to have a secretariat and start issuing newspaper licences to applicants who have waited patiently to launch new media houses. The country’s electronic media has been dominated by the publicly-owned, but state-controlled, ZBC since Independence and it’s now time that the monopoly came to an end.   [read more]

On March 19 and 20, the Nation Media Group and the Africa Media Initiative will hold easily the most high profile African media conference ever witnessed on this fair continent (http://panafricamedia2010kenya.com). The conference will be one of the events to mark Nation Media Group’s 50th anniversary.What interests us is the conference theme: “Media And The Africa Promise: Reflections On The Past, Present, And Prospects For The Future”. How will the media in Kenya, or the wider Africa, look like by 2020?

One place to begin finding answers is the Internet edition of the Daily Nation (www.nation.co.ke). The Nation website is the most read news and current affairs site in eastern Africa, and when I last checked, the seventh highest ranked in that category in Africa.

[read more]

Only 24% of persons seen, heard, or read about in the news are female. This is one of the key findings of the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). The preliminary report is being released on 2 March 2010 at a panel discussion and debate on the occasion of the 54th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in New York. 10 November 2009 was an ordinary day at work for newsroom staff around the world. It was, however, a special day for volunteer groups in 130 countries across the world who were poring over their national newspapers, listening intently to radio newscasts and closely watching local television. Pencils and coding grids in hand, their objective was to observe, analyze and record their findings on selected indicators of gender in the news for the Global Media Monitoring Project - the world's largest research and action initiative on gender in the news media. The project's overarching purpose is to bring about fair and balanced gender representation in and through the news media.   [Read more  on fesmedia.org/statements-and-reports/detail/datum/2010/03/02/who-makes-the-news-2010-global-media-monitoring-project-preliminary-report-2/]

When I was asked to compile this column, I thought I had to be particularly careful not to overlap with other forecasters by talking about the interaction between social networking and media - but it's impossible. Social networking has impacted onto every form of communication, especially media. With just a cellphone you can be aware of what's happening anywhere in the world - virtually as it's happening...

The impact of social media is increasing daily. Whenever people turn on their computers, they're likely to receive a message that could change their thinking on a particular issue or make them aware of a new product. In other words, a blurring of the lines between public relations, advertising and straightforward news and editorial.

[ Read more]

Traditional media - mainly newspapers - still generate the bulk of the information that reaches the public, according to a research report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. A study into the 'news ecology' in Baltimore, US, found that new media platforms and services like Twitter mainly repeat information generated elsewhere.

An overview of the research on the Pew Research Center's website reads:

Where does the news come from in today's changing media?Who really reports the news that most people get about their communities? What role do new media, blogs and specialty news websites now play?How, in other words, does the modern news "ecosystem" of a large American city work? And if newspapers were to die -- to the extent that we can infer from the current landscape -- what would that imply for what citizens would know and not know about where they live?The questions are becoming increasingly urgent. As the economic model that has subsidized professional journalism collapses, the number of people gathering news in traditional television, print and radio organizations is shrinking markedly. What, if anything, is taking up that slack?

[read more]

After setting up an Nairobi office in early 2008, Article 19 now issued the first newsletter of a monthly newsletter series on media developments and freedom of expression in East Africa.

Article19 Newsletter

This month has certainly been busy for the staff at A19 in Nairobi, Kenya. At the forefront of the month’s agenda has been the implementation of The Kenya Communications (Amendment) Act1. Where does A19 come in? Well, in Kenya there are between four and six dominant media groups which hold most of the broadcast frequencies and radio stations posing a threat to the plurality and diversity of Kenyan voices and opinions heard over our airwaves. The Kenya Communications (Amendment) Act aims at tackling this problem as well as the issue of lack of regulation of the ICT sector.

[read more]

A new report entitled: Public Broadcast Services in Africa Series has urged the government of Zimbabwe to commit to media reforms. Citing the highly controversial Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), which established the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Commission, a body that has immense power to make or break all media in the country; the report, launched in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, urges the government to place top priority in ensuring that: ‘Laws inhibiting the free operations of the media are repealed without delay.’

[read more]

Governments and development agencies have devoted many years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing democratic governance in countries around the world. The idea of creating democracies is still the primary driver of many governance improvement agendas. Clearly, democratic systems often bring with them improvements in governance and economic development, but simply putting a democracy into place is not enough.

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