Journalism and Social Media in Africa

Studies in Innovation and Transformation

Chris Paterson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415745260
• eBook ISBN: 9781317755265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through innovative research studies and expert commentaries, this book documents the fast evolving invention of the relationship between the millions of social media and mobile phone users around Africa and traditional purveyors of news. Whilst social media demonstrates an unprecedented ability for the politically engaged to both bypass and influence traditional information flows, it also faces unique circumstances through much of Africa. Signs of social change brought by mobile technology are evident around the continent, raising questions about the nature of information exchange and citizenship. Working from a wide variety of perspectives and methodologies, the contributors to this collection address key questions emerging from rapid communication change in Africa. This book reveals how new, participatory, interactive communications technologies are enabling new tellings of Africa's stories.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies.

Journalism and social media in the African context

Chris Paterson

Much has been written in recent years about the rise of social media (broadly speaking, those communications technologies supporting digital sharing and dialoguing), but there has still been quite limited examination of the African context, with the notable exception of the social media’s role in permitting civil society actors to communicate outside of established commercial and state channels during the so-called Arab Spring (Shirky 2011); though as Loudon and Mazumdar point out in this issue, even that discourse may be, if not overstated, ill informed.

While this special issue of Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies was conceived as an opportunity to examine the implications of social media for African journalism, it became clear that in defining ‘social media’ and ‘African journalism’ narrowly, we found their connections, and the extent of comprehensive research examining those, relatively nascent. Atton and Mabweazara (2011, 668), in their overview of research into new media and journalism in Africa, observe that ‘research has largely lacked theoretical and empirical grounding in terms of examining how African mainstream journalists are forging “new” ways to practise their profession in the light of technological changes in their newsrooms’. But participatory journalism, in which narrowly defined ‘social media’ (blogging, tweeting and the like) play an integral role, is thriving around Africa and, with it, a significant body of research is emerging, including the examples which appear here. Importantly, though, as some authors point out in this issue, even where journalists in Africa are eager to embrace social media in their work, it is usually the case that the majority of adults in their country have no access to such media.

Collectively, the research described in this issue suggests that new forms of citizenship are emerging around Africa, as a result of widespread and innovative popular interaction with new communications technologies, including social media and the adaptation of mainstream media to those trends. I am reminded as I write these words in the United Kingdom (UK), that at the ‘twenty-year anniversary of text messaging’ some of the technologies having the most pronounced effect on society around Africa now are deemed passé by a Northern news media always clamouring for the latest techno-trend. But SMS (short message service, or ‘texting’), while not conventionally deemed a ‘social medium’ is, in the African context, the dominant facilitator of new modes of participatory journalism in Africa, as many researchers have described (e.g., Moyo 2009). Furthermore, as an often shared resource in Africa (Nyamnjoh 2005), it is perhaps more genuinely social than Internet-based technologies which still have little impact in Africa outside of an urban middle class with affordable and consistent Internet access.

Given its rapid and recent uptake and apparent utility for both the poor and the middle classes, the mobile phone has increasingly occupied a central position in discourse about participatory media in Africa. Over at least the last half decade there has been mounting evidence that the technology is being used, to varying degrees, by citizens to contribute to news-making and information exchange in influential ways (Mabweazara 2011; Moyo, D. 2009; Moyo, L. 2011). Bivens (2008, 119) observes that in Zimbabwe ‘information sent from mobile phones makes up some of the only news coverage mainstream media organisations can acquire’. It has also become increasingly clear that a significant amount of news and comment circulates among the Internet-connected in many African countries - a plethora of blog-based conversations which reflect, and reflect upon, mainstream sources, but which also inform a particular politically engaged public quite independently of that mainstream. Moyo (2009) refers to this as the ‘parallel market of information’, and the short case studies later in this issue provide examples.

The social media demonstrate an unprecedented ability for the politically engaged to both bypass and influence traditional information flows, but social media use faces unique challenges throughout much of Africa, due to underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructure, limited (though rapidly increasing) extra-urban mobile access, and bandwidth limitations in many areas. There has been a rapid escalation in the number of people using Twitter to monitor and disseminate information (Smith 2012), and the use of mobile devices is skyrocketing amid massive marketing campaigns dominated by the few multinational mobile service providers.

The embrace of communications technologies in postcolonial Africa might be crudely characterised as coming in three waves. The first was the transition from colonial to post-colonial media structures which, in their turn, proved to be propagandistic, elitist, lacking in content diversity, and only marginally more democratic than they had been under colonial regimes. The second was the tidal wave of mostly imported television raining down from newly accessible satellite broadcasters in the 1990s, and the accompanying terrestrial retransmissions of that imported culture via newly privatised broadcasters; the aggressive expansion across the continent by South African satellite television; and burgeoning MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service, or ‘wireless cable’) networks in African cities. Heralded by some as a ‘renaissance’ and a democratisation of the airwaves, this author (1998) asked whether it was also media imperialism at best, or re-colonisation via the media sphere at worst.

While public service broadcasting was eviscerated under the rubric of liberalisation, commercial broadcasters (in radio and television) have flourished, eager to advertise to a small but fast-growing number of Africans with disposable income. Throughout those decades of change in the electronic media a print press has survived in most countries, and positively thrived in some, with widely varying degrees of independence from government, though much commentary on the African press questions the possibility of journalism making any useful contribution to democratisation when it is itself constrained by market forces. Opuamie-Ngoa (2010, 141–142) cautions:

As opposed to the dedication with which Africa’s anti-colonial press discharged its functions, a ‘global village’ disease called ‘profit motive’ derived from the economic logic of diversification and the creation of giant industrial concerns has infected the traditional watchdog role of the media … The continent’s media today seem to be at its best as proxies in the battle between rival political camps sowing hatred, cynicism, public apathy and divisiveness.

The third wave is the one with democratic promise: the rapid embrace of interactive and personal communications technologies. It is what Running (2009, 26) calls Africa’s ‘new media pluralism’. Public conversation is increasingly held apart from the discourse of mainstream newspapers and broadcasters – at times critiquing that mainstream discourse, at times supplementing it, and perhaps at times pushing professional journalists toward a broader agenda and more in-depth analysis.

Mudhai (2011) applied Beckett’s (2010) UK-based conception of a ‘networked journalism’ to his study of the shifting nature of newspaper reporting in Kenya, suggesting that mainstream media there show signs of struggling to catch up with an active blogosphere and to remain relevant, as events are increasingly debated via social media as they occur. In research presented at the 2012 International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference in Durban, Kenyan newspaper journalist, Irene Awino, described an emerging focus on ‘day-two journalism’ at Kenya’s major newspapers, where it is rare for newspapers to break stories given the increasingly rapid dissemination of, and discussion about, political news on social media; therefore the focus has to be on providing alterative angles and in-depth analysis the next day. In his study of the role of SMS messages and blogging in the 2008 Zimbabwe elections, Dumisani Moyo (2009) concludes that ‘citizen journalism is not necessarily emerging as a distinct form of “unmediated” space of communication, but rather as a hybrid form, as mainstream media increasingly tap into that space as a way of creating a certain impression about their close links to the citizenry as testimony of citizen engagement’. Indeed, we might question whether new interactions between mainstream journalism and citizen journalists are genuinely participatory journalism or merely an emerging form of public subsidy for an under-resourced journalism sector – what Fuchs (2009) describes as the ‘Internet gift commodity strategy’, where the uncompensated public provision of content fills the web pages of commercial media.

Newspapers in even some of Africa’s poorest countries have, for some time, been creatively building networks of citizen reporters to extend their newsgathering reach. George Kasakula, an editor from the Nation print and online newspaper in Malawi, told me how

in 2007 our Saturday edition, Weekend Nation, sounded out citizen journalists from across the country to write their own stories and send them … the results were so overwhelming that management decided to allocate not only one page but two. Now we have a network of over 500 citizen journalists across the country sending in stories using various ICT means … we pay them about $2 for every story or picture published to encourage them. (Pers. comm., 3 December 2012).

But with useful new professional-amateur collaborations in news production there is also a concern about the tendency in poorly resourced newsrooms to rely heavily on information which appears to hang invitingly in cyberspace, seeming to urge journalists to employ it as ‘news’, with little or no verification. Mabweazara has conducted some of the most extensive observational newsroom research in several African countries. He has documented a variety of important changes underway, but observed ‘the ethical and professional challenges that have emerged with the use of the Internet in the newsroom, precisely the practice of “copying and pasting” material from the Internet (sometimes without attribution, verification or attempts to talk face to face with sources)’, and the pasting of Facebook conversations with sources into stories (Mabweazara 2011, 61). One Zimbabwean editor told Mabweazara that the problem with journalists growing dependent on Facebook ‘is that it slants your stories toward a few people who use the platform and therefore leads to journalists missing a lot of good ideas outside the networks’(2011, 64).

SMS-based citizen journalist networks offer opportunities to shift journalism away from the level of the purely urban and national political scene. A challenge will be for national journalists to avoid the kind of sensational and bizarre stories which have so long characterised the stereotypical Western view of rural Africa, and to put such networks to use bringing a serious journalism to the continent’s most disenfranchised. Where was a school promised but never built? Where is medical care lacking? Many journalists trained in a Northern tradition and working for intensely commercial organisations tend to dismiss such stories as an outmoded ‘development news’ model of little relevance to an urban readership. Such views threaten to limit any practical value of such extended news-gathering networks.

A vital question remains the extent to which social media and new communications technologies will contribute to political change in some of Africa’s less democratic countries. While most of South Africa’s neighbours contributed at great cost to that country’s democratisation, some still exhibit considerable popular discontent with their own governance, including those which are democratic but with dominant ruling parties, such as Mozambique, and those which are not democratic, such as the Kingdom of Swaziland. That social media and ICTs will play a key role in political resistance and change in this region is already clear, but what remains less evident is whether that process will be gradual and deliberative, or disruptive, sudden and sweeping, as in North Africa. This journal issue investigates that conundrum in two ways: Mare’s comprehensive overview of the relationship between mainstream and social media in the context of protest around southern Africa is followed by a special section of brief research summaries addressing particular aspects of the nexus between new media and social upheaval in three such countries – Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Swaziland.

Much of the published research to date on participatory journalism in Africa focuses on Nigeria, Kenya, the Arab north and the English-speaking south (especially Zimbabwe and South Africa). But studies from Swaziland and Mozambique are rare; a notable exception is Salgado’s (2012) research on Lusophone Africa.

Equally important, however, is the impact of social media on journalism about Africa: whether in stories told by foreign or exile news services, or the communications of non-governmental organisations interested in conveying a certain view of Africa to the public and journalists alike; or indeed, those stories projected to the world about Africa from Africa. This issue examines, in various ways, the external image of Africa, and how the relationships of journalists (African and non-African) with social media specifically, and new media generally, impact on that. Africa has long been subject to a prejudiced form of reporting which has focused almost exclusively on specific types of negative events, with little attention to long-term processes. Do social media amplify the negative or give new voice to the positive? Do they provide a new avenue to reach journalists outside of Africa directly, to facilitate more nuanced reporting, and to critique that which falls into the old ‘Afro-pessimist’ paradigm? (De B’béri and Louw 2011). In a final comment in this issue, Nothias addresses the case of the ‘Kony2012’ campaign, which set social media records for its massive worldwide viewership but provoked ire and anguish for its reinforcement of damaging stereotypes. (An especially creative response to such stereotypes in the final weeks of 2012 was the ‘Radi-aid’ campaign by South African and Norwegian students and artists [see http://www.africafornorway.no], designed to raise awareness of the long-term problem of stereotyping Africa amongst journalists and the public.)

Authors in the current issue take on this variety of questions, but share a common interest in how new, participatory, interactive communications technologies are enabling new tellings of Africa’s stories. This issue begins with Akinfemisoye’s research into the role of social media in facilitating an alternative telling of the story of social protest in Nigeria, and moves on to Jordaan’s research into the routine incorporation of social media in the work of South African newspaper journalists.

Subsequent articles address several implications of social media in the story told to the world about Africa, beginning with Vicente who, as part of a larger project on the foreign correspondent in Africa, provides a glimpse of social media use by international correspondents based in Nairobi. Loudon and Mazumdar present research on the representation of social media by journalists in the case of North African revolution, while Cooley and Jones examine the use of Twitter to inform the world about African humanitarian crises. Finally, the research articles in this issue conclude with Mare’s examination of social media in political protest in southern Africa, and the three short case studies from that region, all mentioned earlier.

With gratitude to the reviewers and others who have assisted, and to all who answered the call for research contributions to this issue, the editor hopes this collection will contribute to a recent but growing evidence base and will serve to inspire a greater investigation of the intersection between African journalism and fast-emerging communications technologies.

References

Atton, C. and H. Mabweazara. 2011. New media and journalism practice in Africa: An agenda for research. Journalism 12(6): 667–673.

Banda, F., O.F. Mudhai and W.J. Tettey. 2009. Introduction: New media and democracy in Africa – a critical interjection. In African media and the digital public sphere, ed. O.F. Mudhai, W.J. Tettey and F. Banda, 1–20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Beckett, C. 2010. The value of networked journalism. Conference concept report, POLIS (Journalism and Society). London: London School of Economics and Political Science.

Bivens, R.K. 2008. The Internet, mobile phones and blogging. Journalism Practice 2(1): 113–129.

De B’béri, B.E. and P.E. Louw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Journalism and social media in the African context
• Research reports
• Research reports: Case studies from southern Africa
• Comment
• Index