Participatory Journalism In Africa

This book offers an African perspective on how news organisations are embracing digital participatory practices as part of their everyday news production, dissemination and audience engagement strategies. Drawing on empirical evidence from news organisations in sub-Saharan Africa, Participatory Journalism in Africa investigates and maps out professional practices emerging with journalists’ direct interactions with readers and sources via online user comment spaces and social media platforms. Using a social constructivist approach, the book focuses on the challenges relating to the elite-centric nature of active participation on the platforms, while also highlighting emerging ethical and normative dilemmas. The authors also point to the hidden structural controls to participation and user engagement associated with artificial intelligence, chatbots and algorithms. These obstacles, coupled with low digital literacy levels and the well-established pitfalls of the digital divide, challenge the utopian view that in Africa interactive digital technologies are the sine qua non spaces for democratic participation. This is a valuable resource for academics, journalists and students across a wide range of disciplines including journalism studies, communication, sociology and political science.

This book investigates the role of citizen journalism in railroading social and political changes in sub-Saharan Africa. Case studies are drawn from research conducted by leading scholars from the fields of media studies, journalism, anthropology and history, who uniquely probe the real impact of technologies in driving change in Africa.

Very little is known about how African journalists are forging "new" ways to practise their profession on the web. Against this backdrop, this volume provides contextually rooted discussions of trends, practices, and emerging cultures of web-based journalism(s) across the continent, offering a comprehensive research tool that can both stand the test of time as well as offer researchers (particularly those in the economically developed Global North) models for cross-cultural comparative research. The essays here deploy either a wide range of evidence or adopt a case-study approach to engage with contemporary developments in African online journalism. This book thus makes up for the gap in cross-cultural studies that seek to understand online journalism in all its complexities.

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 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.

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.

This book investigates the role of citizen journalism in railroading social and political changes in sub-Saharan Africa. Case studies are drawn from research conducted by leading scholars from the fields of media studies, journalism, anthropology and history, who uniquely probe the real impact of technologies in driving change in Africa.