New Journalism Ecologies In East And Southern Africa

This volume presents case studies of news media employing and integrating social media into their news production practices. It links social media use to journalistic practices and news production processes in the digital age of the Global South. Critically, the chapters look at seminal cases of start-up news media whose content is informed by trends in social media, ethical considerations and participatory cultures spurred by the wide use of social media. There has been considerable research looking at the potential of new media technologies, traditional journalism and citizen reporting. The extent to which these new media technologies and ‘citizen journalism’ have morphed or reconfigured traditional journalism practice remains debatable. Currently, there are questions around the limits of social media in journalism practice as the ethical lines continue to become blurred. It is this conundrum of the role of social media in the reconfiguration of the media, news making, production and participatory cultures that requires more investigation. Social media has also turned the logic of the political economy of media production on its head as citizens can now produce, package and distribute news and information with shoestring budgets and in authoritarian regimes with no license of practice. This new political economy means the power that special interest groups used to enjoy is increasingly slipping from their hands as citizens take back the power to appropriate social media journalism to counter hegemonic narratives. Citizens can also perform journalistic roles of investigating and whistleblowing but with a lack off, or limited, regulation. This volume seeks to explore and untangle these issues, and provides an invaluable resource for researchers across the field of journalism, mass media, and communication studies.

This volume examines the trends and patterns of journalists’ harassment in Africa and assesses the policy interventions and protection mechanisms that are put into place in the region. Drawing from case studies from selected African countries, an international team of authors offer a broad insight into the state of harassment across the continent, while building new theoretical perspectives that are also context-specific. The chapters bring previous theories and research up to date by addressing the continual change and development of new discourses, including the use of big data and artificial intelligence in harassing and intimidating journalists and mental health issues affecting journalists in their line of duty. More so, the authors argue that the state and form of harassment is not universal, as location and context are some of the key factors that influence the form and character of harassment. Offering new theoretical insights into the scope of journalism practices in Africa, this book will interest students and scholars of journalism, African studies, political science, media and communication studies, journalism practice and gender studies.

Digitisation, AI and Algorithms in African Journalism and Media Contexts moves the focus from the West, addressing the significant knowledge gaps relating to the current state of AI, algorithms and data-driven journalism, as well as the implications for political, social, cultural, markets, media viability and journalism education.

This book explores how popular cultural artifacts, literary texts, commemorative practices and other forms of remembrances are used to convey, transmit and contest memories of mass atrocities in the Global South. Some of these historical atrocities took place during the Cold war. As such, this book unpacks the influence or role of the global powers in conflict in the Global South. Contributors are grappling with a number of issues such as the politics of memorialization, memory conflicts, exhumations, reburials, historical dialogue, peacebuilding and social healing, memory activism, visual representation, transgenerational transmission of memories, and identity politics.

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.

African newsrooms are experiencing the disruptive impact of new digital technologies on the way they generate and disseminate news. Indeed, newsrooms are being forced to adapt in various ways and there are clear dimensions of localized creativity and adaptations by journalists to the digital revolution. In the same way, the influences of digitization, Internet, and social media are changing the informational needs of readers, including how they engage with news. These developments nonetheless remain on the margins of ‘mainstream’ journalism research – very few researchers have sought to qualitatively capture the implications of developments in digital technologies on the routine practices of African journalists, especially in their ‘natural habitat’, the newsroom. In this light, this edited volume interrogates the changing ecology of newsmaking in Africa in the context of rapid technological changes in newsrooms as well as in the wider social context of news production. It brings together six contributions drawn from five countries: Egypt, Mozambique, South Africa, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, to explore practices, challenges and professional normative dilemmas emerging with the adoption and appropriation of new technologies. While the studies point to dimensions of localised new technology appropriations as defined by the complex socio-political structures in which African journalists operate, they are not rigidly confined to Africa. They are expressly in dialogue with theoretical observations largely emerging from Western scholarship. In this sense, the book goes beyond simply mainstreaming African perspectives, it engages directly with dominant theoretical observations and offers a point of departure for developing what could loosely be branded as an African digital journalism epistemology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Journalism.

This book discusses the growing media engagement between China and Africa from the point of view of both these regions. The rapid increase in Sino-African contact has led to many controversies and debates in the media, often represented in simplistic terms and stereotypes that call for more in-depth scholarly analysis. Not only have the relationship between Africa and China made headlines in the media, but the media itself has also become increasingly central in the exchanges of capital and human resources between these two regions. The media has also become the terrain where China’s new foreign policy takes shape in the form of ‘soft power’. This volume brings together authors from Africa, China, the US, UK and Europe to provide analysis, comment and empirical evidence to deepen our understanding of how the geopolitical shift towards the emerging regions of China and Africa are playing out on media terrain. The implications for transnational flows of media capital and content on journalistic approaches, press freedom and normative frameworks are discussed, as well as how African journalists have responded to these changes. The result is a collection of perspectives that refuses simplistic conclusions about what the growing engagement between China and Africa might mean, but presents a range of arguments informed by scholarly research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies.

This book explores how popular cultural artifacts, literary texts, commemorative practices and other forms of remembrances are used to convey, transmit and contest memories of mass atrocities in the Global South. Some of these historical atrocities took place during the Cold war. As such, this book unpacks the influence or role of the global powers in conflict in the Global South. Contributors are grappling with a number of issues such as the politics of memorialization, memory conflicts, exhumations, reburials, historical dialogue, peacebuilding and social healing, memory activism, visual representation, transgenerational transmission of memories, and identity politics.