The Eritrean authorities continue to gag all forms of free expression and recently arrested another journalist as he was trying to flee the country, Reporters Without Borders said today, on the eve of the ninth anniversary of the start of a brutal political purge in Asmara on 18 September 2001. The organisation wrote to the British authorities yesterday urging them to prosecute one of the purge’s organisers, who now lives in Britain.[more]

Twenty-nine members of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), a worldwide coalition of press freedom groups, yesterday voiced their support for the open letter which fellow IFEX members Reporters Without Borders and Journalist in Danger (JED), its partner organisation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sent to President Joseph Kabila on 30 August.[more]

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today vehemently condemned the brutal murder of Prime Radio anchorman, Dickson Ssentongo, who was severely beaten by unknown assailants and abandoned to die in a cassava plantation in Mukono District some 35 km from the capital Kampala on Monday, 13 September, 2010.[more]

ARTICLE 19 calls on the government of Somalia to amend the media law based on proposals by the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) and recommendations made by ARTICLE 19 in a legal analysis released today.[more]

A Strike by Air Zimbabwe pilots, which resulted in the cancellation of most of the airline’s international flights, leaving thousands of travellers stranded, made headlines in all the media this week.[more]

The digital transition is not simply a technical changeover but an opportunity to provide better broadcasting for Africa’s citizens. The best of the continent’s telecoms policy-makers and regulators have been innovative in how they have tackled the issues they have faced. But in an area like broadcasting that is closer to the “powers that be” and potentially more threatening, there has been little sign of much needed innovation. Russell Southwood thinks the time has come to re-examine how public broadcasting works (or perhaps more accurately, doesn’t work) in Africa. Public broadcasting in Africa had a poor start in life. The colonial administrations who set up radio stations often exerted a strong control over their media so for newly-independent Governments, the former colonialists were in a poor position to be giving lectures about public purposes: the views expressed on the colonial radio stations reflected those of the administration and sometimes settlers in the country in question. [more]

In August, Shabelle Media Network, one of Somalia's leading independent broadcasters, did something incredibly brave--they rebroadcast news and music that the BBC's Somali-language service beams to the war-torn Horn of African nation in defiance of a ban imposed by hard-line militant Islamist rebel groups Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam. For Somali journalists, who risk death by crossfire and assassination, and censorship from both insurgents and the weak U.S.-backed transitional government, it was a courageous pushback against forces hostile to independent media.[more]

Reporters Without Borders is deeply shocked and saddened to learn that Dickson Ssentongo, a news presenter on Prime Radio, a Seventh Day Adventist station in the southeastern district of Mukono, was beaten to death by unidentified assailants using metal bars as he walked to work on 13 September.[more]

Reporters Without Borders deplores journalist Paul Kiggundu’s murder by a crowd of angry motorcyclists in the southern town of Rakai on 10 September. The correspondent of Top Radio and several TV stations, he was beaten to death when spotted filming their attack on a suspect’s home.[more]

Last week Google held a very well attended G-Kenya event for developers. But this has been just one of several things that have been happening on the continent that show a renewed focus on services and apps development. There is fertile ground for African tech innovators but they need to decide what prize they will be seeking, writes Russell Southwood. For a moment, it seemed like there would be lots of bandwidth (both national and international) and crashing prices but not much local content, services or apps to use on it. But below the radar, there have been a number of developments that saw the light of day over the last month that show Africa’s tech entrepreneurs are gearing up to fill this gap.[more]