Europe and the world are turning an eye on Africa, looking for genuine news and images from the continent. Increasingly, Western media companies covet any news local African people can capture with a telephone mobile or a small video camera. They are building multimedia platforms to offer webloggers, photographers and citizen journalists who have access to these Internet and mobile technologies a place to contribute to the news from the continent.

Netherlands-based media company Africa Interactive has started AfricaNews to feature user-generated content coming from Africa. The website is sectioned traditionally, with business, society, culture, microcredits and travel pieces. Everything is published in English – and also in Dutch, at AfricaNieuws. 

On an interactive map of the continent, the display offers breaking news from each country, provided by the leading news feeds available, plus original content from AfricaNews and related photography and links. The company employs editorial departments in the Netherlands, Kenya and South Africa. In the section ‘Weblogs,’ a Google mashup shows the location of the AfricanNews reporters. Every week, a different weblog is featured and given more space.

An interesting section of the the website is ‘Voices of Africa.’ The 1-year-old citizen journalism platform Skoeps contributed to launch this project in May 2007. Using their mobile phones, citizen reporters cover local news and send reports to Skoeps, which puts them online. The project is coordinated from Harleem, Netherlands, by Olivier Nyirubugara.
‘This is a revolution,’ he says. Everyone is given the possibility of live reporting. New technologies, such as the General Packet Radio System (GPRS), allow people who don’t have Internet access the chance to generate content for the web.
Nyirubugara says this trend can lead to the reinforcement of democracy and good governance through the fostering of communication and interaction among people. At the same time, he recognises that the number of African citizen journalists, reporters and photographers remains low compared to Europe. 

The objective of AfricanNews is to try ‘to give a more balanced and positive view of the African continent than mainstream media.’ Browsing the website, the subjects covered include not only social and political issues, but also local business stories and nature photographs. The image that is transmitted challenges the conventional wisdom conveyed by Western reporting. Focusing on a local perspective, AfricaNews gives a deeper insight of the issues affecting a beautiful and multifaceted continent.

E. Delaini

Published: October 12, 2007