The World Association of News Publishers has an annual Digital Media Africa conference, and this year the ninth iteration was held in Nairobi over three days in September.
The theme was “Shaping the Future of News Media in Africa”, and included topics such as how to connect with a younger generation of news consumers (startlingly titled: “The Earthshaking Challenge of Engaging Younger Generations”), and how to demystify data and create a unified, newsroom-friendly data culture. Which, now that I think about it, strikes me as something that should already have taken place in newsrooms.
AI cast its ominous shadow over everything, as you would expect. I gave a presentation entitled “Putting the Africa into AI: [em dash] — current imaginary, future realities” (sic), about the threats and opportunities that AI holds for the news industry. More specifically, I spoke about the proliferation of AI hype and the attendant AI slop, and the risks this poses to the integrity of our information ecosystem.
I’m not certain how many in the audience noticed the em dash in my title, but I’m sure FM readers will appreciate the self-reflexive nod to the language of LLMs (large language models).
I said: “LLMs radically overstate how trustworthy their outputs are to a public that has been so bathed in AI hype, that many of them assume that the robot is right about everything. AI slop and AI deep fakes have profound ramifications for journalism. My organisation, Code for Africa, is a partner on the Reuters Institute for Journalism’s Digital News Report (Reuters DNR), and this year’s report indicates that, of the 48 countries that the report covers, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa are in the top five when it comes to digital news consumers saying that they are worried about being able to tell what is real and what is fake online.”
The fact that people don’t know what to trust is an existential threat to journalism, and to democracies. The Reuters DNR has been tracking that decline in trust over the years, with the global average now sitting at 40%. Note these repeated references to the Reuters DNR, because this is a leitmotif that is threaded through this column.
I also spoke about a current pet concern of mine, and one which I’ve made mention of before in the august pages of the FM. That is, I can’t help seeing parallels between the colonial project as we traditionally think of it, how the big social media platforms colonised the information space, and with how AI platforms are rolling out across Africa.
The rapid development of AI is increasingly being seen by many as part of an arms race between nations such as the US and China, with a few lesser players hunting around the fringes of what is, if you look at it a certain way, just a continuation of the Cold War. The Cold War in the Cloud, if you will. And as happened with the original Cold War, African nations are going to become pawns in AI’s geopolitical game.
I’m calling this The Scramble for AI, a reference to The Scramble for Africa. To remind those of us who have long since outsourced our knowledge of history to digital minions (and fully aware of the hypocrisy of that gibe, as I’m quoting from Wikipedia here), the Scramble for Africa refers to “the invasion, conquest, and colonisation of most of Africa by seven Western European powers driven by the Second Industrial Revolution during the late 19th century and early 20th century”. This theft was regulated at the 1884 Berlin Conference, where 14 colonial countries sat around a table and divvied up Africa. It won’t surprise you to learn that no Africans had a seat at this table.
My talk was followed by two others, presented by heavyweight intellects in media research and praxis, that were also based on the data from the Reuters DNR. The first was by Arun Venkataraman, Google’s global lead of emerging voices and research for the Google News Initiative (GNI). His talk was entitled “The Evolving News Value Proposition and a Changing News Ecosystem”. He provided an overview of changing news consumer behaviours in Africa and looked at the implications of this for how news is valued.
He also discussed some of GNI’s recent efforts to help publishers across Africa navigate a changing ecosystem. These include Project Oasis, a global research project focused on mapping, studying and supporting independent digital native news organisations.
(Disclosure: Code for Africa, the organisation I work for, is mapping some of the African news ecosystem as part of this project.)
Besides producing a database of these digital native news organisations, Project Oasis analyses their business models, sustainability, revenue sources and challenges. It then provides resources, insights and case studies to support the growth and resilience of independent journalism.
Venkataraman’s presentation included slides that used data from the Reuters DNR to sketch the profile of African news creators, news influencers, and consumers. Some interesting takeaways from the report included that Africa has some of the highest portions of users accessing YouTube for news, and — crucially for the future of trusted news in Africa — we’re way ahead of the global average for trusting news (40%).
Nic Newman’s presentation, which was a deep dive into what the young news audience in Africa looks like, entirely featured research from the Reuters DNR. Which is unsurprising, as Newman is a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the lead author of the report, and basically an LLM for the state of digital news globally.
He previewed a Reuters report on news influencers which is launching soon, and revealed that creators and influencers are having a bigger impact in Africa than elsewhere, and that people in Africa tend to be heavy users of multiple social networks. He quoted some stats: in South Africa, 44% of people share news via social media and e-mail. In Kenya it’s 51% and in Nigeria it’s a huge 59%. TikTok is the fastest-growing network for news, especially in the Global South.
While both these papers were hugely informative, that isn’t primarily what concerns me for this column. While listening to Google’s Venkataraman, I couldn’t help wondering if he knew that the only reason he had African data to reference was because a tiny African nonprofit had stepped up and funded the African countries included in the report.
The Google News Initiative is the principal sponsor of the Reuters DNR, but that doesn’t stretch to covering African countries, which is why Code for Africa helps fund the research in Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. African newsrooms and funders make decisions on the valuable data that is surfaced by the Reuters DNR, but they would be much better informed if the data included more African countries. We can already see that the inclusion of Morocco in the past two years brings a totally different perspective.
For example, when we look at the figures for trust in news, Nigeria (68%) tops the list of 48 countries covered, with Kenya (65%) third, and South Africa (55%) fifth. That info might lead you to suggest that African newsrooms are at a moment where they still have the opportunity to consolidate their relationships with their audience, which would be true for those countries. Morocco (28%), though, is way down the list at number 42.
It’s this sort of data diversity that we need. If this research isn’t done, we risk not having African voices at the table when decisions are taken about how to assist and fund African news creators and influencers. Even more troubling, how will we understand the dynamic between legacy media and the new breed of news creators; what can be saved and what must be sacrificed.
This is not to suggest that there aren’t African organisations and interest groups out there that aren’t already putting an enormous amount of effort into quantifying and understanding our media ecosystems.
But if we aren’t staking our claim to be a much more extensive part of one of the most influential reports into the state of digital news globally, we are not giving decision-makers enough information to make sure African creators are served in the same way as their data-rich counterparts elsewhere. We are fond of laughing at people who think Africa is a country, but I fear it’s equally risible to think of Africa as four countries. We need more data. Africans need to invest in our future, and claim our spots at the table.
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