Innovation could save African newsrooms
Evolving journalists’ roles will help newsrooms stay relevant.
I spent the last week of October 2019 at the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media, at Poynter’s campus in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was six days of intense learning, introspection, and deliberating on my career, the broader media landscape in South Africa, Africa, and globally.
The Poynter programme focuses on the skills and knowledge required to rise to the higher levels of digital media leadership, and programs are structured to encourage open and candid discussion, exploration of issues unique to women, and hands-on mentoring.
It’s difficult to distill what I experienced during the training into one idea. We covered everything from diversity and inclusion, to ethical leadership, and finding work-life chemistry. For me, the overarching thread running through all of the programmes, was that women lead differently to men, and differently to each other — and that is good for everyone. Diversity in leadership is an asset.
The second salient point from the academy is that US and European newsrooms have a broader definition of journalism, and they keep innovating the makeup of their newsrooms — especially the most prolific and innovative newsrooms such as the New York Times and Vox Media. African newsrooms need to review their often outdated ideas of what a journalist is, and local journalists need to be trained into new roles if newsrooms want to survive in an ever-changing landscape.
This left me reflecting on my own career. My first job was at MWEB News, creating digital content and helping to build editorial products. My job title was Product Manager. I was told more than once that I’m not a ‘real’ product manager, because I didn’t have a tech background. I was also not considered a journalist, because I didn’t report the news. However, my journalism training taught me critical thinking skills, and I had a natural inclination toward politics and social issues. With my knowledge of the internet at the time, I understood how people interacted online.
My interest in social and political issues, coupled with my knowledge of how people were engaging online, meant I was able to build invaluable UX into the ‘blogs’ product. I engaged with the audience regularly and I could direct the iterations of the product, grow it and the audience, and foster a community around the product.
Just recently I saw two old MWEB bloggers meet up via Instagram and reminisce on how they met on that platform. The MWEB blogs platform was killed more than 10 years ago. While working there, I was repeatedly interviewed by media about whether blogs were a threat to journalism. Fast-forward 16 years and young newsroom product managers (for the lucky newsrooms who have them) are probably going to be asked if AI is a threat to journalism. The answer is still no.
Since then I’ve had many job titles, product manager, programme manager, online editor, all within the context of media. But I was never allowed to call myself a journalist because I didn’t report the news. This type of myopic thinking still permeates the newsroom culture in South Africa, if you aren’t reporting, you aren’t a journalist. Yet it is journalistic principles that informed the digital products that I helped launch. I was lucky to be at the turning points of many of the important news technologies of the past 15 years — blogs, social media, data journalism, search, video, multimedia and multi-platform publishing. And I can tell you that if you don’t have journalists embedding those principles in your products, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Your entire team needs to align around your mission and understand the importance of the work you do, and that includes your business, product, and tech teams.
Budgets are tight and newsrooms are laying off staff annually. But if you’re lucky enough to be in a position to reshuffle roles and upskill your team, these are a few roles you might want to consider having in your newsroom.
Off-Platform Editor
The core responsibilities of your off-platform editor is to make sure your content looks good off your platforms, in other words, the platforms you don’t control. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etcetera. Everything that is not on your website or your printed newspaper, is considered off-platform. South African news media are still using exactly the same headline from print (still considered the main product) on their websites and on every social media platform they are on. It doesn’t matter how good your investigative piece is if no one is reading it. Your off-platform editor will make sure your piece gets read by the right audience by refocusing the story to fit the platform. For more on this, read up on and follow New York Times off-platform editor Millie Tran.
Growth Manager
The growth manager will focus on all the ways your audience interacts with your product and will be responsible for efficiently growing your audience. This is an important metric for newsrooms, but it’s rarely the focus of any one person. Ideally this person should become obsessed with how people get their news. To get you started on what this role might entail, read this interview with Alexandra Smith, the Growth Director at WhereBy.Us, a platform for community media businesses.
Data Editor
Having a data desk has been proven to increase audience trust in a newsroom. It’s become relatively easy to upskill journalists to data journalists, and shameless punt, but Code for Africa has been doing this successfully in Nigeria and Kenya. Learning how to access public data and how to skilfully use that data in a story can be the difference between your audience trusting your story or not. Data can also easily be miscommunicated and misused, so having journalistic integrity is integral.
These are not the only new roles to add to newsrooms, in fact, I’d also add a Newsroom Product Manager and a Story Designer to this list. But they are going to become increasingly important, so it’s worth taking a look at current roles and consider upskilling your team and replacing outdated job titles and responsibilities. Look at where you want to take your news product, and then start building a team around that.
My week at the Poynter Academy was life-changing, as cliché as it might sound. It gave me the chance to connect the dots and find the common thread. Being around women with similar backgrounds for the first time, and hearing them speak about their careers, gave me the confidence, tools and language to reposition my own career.
If you want to learn more, sign up for the Poynter cohort newsletter here, and you might also want to check out Code for Africa’s free online courses for digital journalists here.
Ashlin Simpson manages Code for Africa’s business development team, helping to build and scale digital projects and products for newsrooms and social justice organisations.
Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of indigenous civic technology and open data laboratories with CfA labs in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and a further five affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco and Sierra Leone and funded projects in a further 12 countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA primarily supports grassroots citizen organisations and the media to help liberate data and empower citizens, but also works with progressive government agencies to improve digital service delivery.
In addition to funding and technology support, CfA’s labs incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONE network, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent. CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
