Reporting Africa, blog by blog
Becky Hogge
28 - 2 - 2007

A new collaboration between the citizen journalists of Global Voices
and Reuters promises refreshing perspectives by and from Africa, says
Becky Hogge.


"Reuters is not responsible for any content provided by external
sources", reads the notice posted beneath a list of links to blog
posts on the international news agency's new portal,
africa.reuters. com. With that disclaimer in place, the Reuters
website, launched on 21 February 2007, promises to aggregate pan-
African news from a number of sources, including the Harvard-based
Global Voices project.

Global Voices was founded in the aftermath of a conference on
blogging in December 2004 by Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of
GeekCorps, and Rebecca MacKinnon, a "recovering" CNN journalist,
working out of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. MacKinnon
and Zuckerman's key realisation was that while American weblogs were
talking to one another and gaining lots of exposure in the
establishment press, blogs from the rest of the world needed a bigger
audience.

The pair set out to redress the balance, recruiting a team of
volunteer regional editors to create a number of "bridge blogs",
daily digests of activity across the international blogosphere that
let the English-speaking world listen in on global conversations. In
late 2005, they attracted financial support from the Reuters
Foundation, hosting their first international get-together in the
news agency's London headquarters.

At the time, many within the community speculated as to where the
relationship with Reuters would take the pioneering project. The
announcement of the new Africa portal on 22 February 2007 has
provided a partial answer. Although Global Voices's content is not
visible on the front page of Reuters Africa, its feeds are clearly
evident once site users make a selection from the "News by Country"
page.

For example: to the right of the "latest news" headlines from the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - generated by Reuters and its own
crisis wire, AlertNet - are more links, listed under "Blogs ...
Provided by Global Voices*". (The asterisk refers to the content
disclaimer.) One link leads to a discussion of the richness of the
Bantu language Lingala, spoken widely in the northwest of the DRC.
Another leads to comment on the growth of a new African dancing
style, inspired by the moves of the Ivorian football star Didier
Drogba.

Zuckerman - speaking to Mark Glaser of MediaShift - said he was
excited by the new African portal because it would point to daily
life and opinion beyond the usual stories of war and tragedy. The
editor of Reuters Africa, John Chiahemen, echoed this view in the
Guardian's media section, saying: "We want to show that Africa can be
covered as a business story, not just a disaster story. While it is
true that African information is available from other sources, there
is no single media I know that has the breadth of content Reuters has
available."

Behind the screen

Reporting from Africa is hard work. The influence of Ryszard
Kapuœciñski lives on beyond his death on 23 January. His tale of
Angola after the Portuguese exodus, Another Day of Life (Random
House, 2001), inspired a generation of reporters - including many who
have written for openDemocracy - to travel to Africa to report its
story to the rest of the world. Yet, more and more, these reporters
are working without the support of a newspaper or magazine back home.

Beyond large news agencies like Reuters, the western media are
increasingly unwilling or unable to fund the correspondents needed to
cover life on the vast continent - to the detriment of colour, depth
and context. It is often left to enterprising and brave young
stringers to make their own arrangements and ensure their own safety.
(I will always remember one email that arrived from the Côte d'Ivoire
on the eve of unrest, sent to me by a correspondent about my own
age: "The UN are pulling out all non-essential staff. I'm going to
stick around and see what happens.")

Some western reporters now find their trips sponsored not by
independent media outlets, but by disaster-led international NGOs. A
veteran of the continent once communicated her wariness at this new
set-up to me, expressing concern over the abundance of tragic images
it produces for the audience back home. Beyond pictures of starving
children and displaced families are cultures and contexts which often
go unreported, a situation which can stunt the west's capacity for
imagining solutions to Africa's troubles.

When Reuters first partnered with Global Voices, many believed that
the citizen journalists the latter was fostering would grow to
replace the dwindling voices of reporters sent across the globe by
western news outlets. Indeed, this scenario was offered to media
traditionalists who complained of revenues lost to the always-on,
always-free demands of new media - more often than not to sounds of
sneering derision.

It seems that the path Reuters has chosen for now is a far more
subtle one. "There's a level of concern in the journalistic
community: "'Are they out to replace me?' The answer is no, God no",
Reuters president Chris Ahearn told MediaShift. Instead, the agency's
Global Voices feeds can provide the depth and context that
traditional western coverage, for whatever reasons, miss out on.

But can we really rely on blogs to give us a picture of a continent
where internet penetration is so low? Although all of Africa's
capital cities have internet connectivity, the situation in rural
areas, where the communications revolution is being driven by the
mobile phone, is quite different. The continent is seeing ferocious
growth in connectivity, yet at the beginning of 2007 overall
penetration was only at 3.5% of the population, compared to 18.8% for
the rest of the world combined. This state of affairs was driven home
to me two weeks ago, when I met a Nigerian delegation at a conference
on freedom of expression and networked communications. Neither
delegate had experienced blogs before.

Rachel Rawlins, managing editor of the Global Voices project,
believes the Reuters move "demonstrates the increasing value placed
by news organisations on the ability of authentic voices to provide
perspective, background and context to the events they cover." But
she recognises that the value this provides is only nascent.
Announcing the Reuters project to her community, Rawlins ended with a
hope that "the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not
only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left
unheard, but also encourages others to join the conversation and
brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but
cannot."

http://www.opendemo cracy.net/ media/africa_ blog_4390. jsp