The African media industry is facing changes and challenges, and during the recent INMA Africa News Media Summit, Joseph Odindo, lecturer at the Aga Khan Graduate School of Media Studies in Kenya, shared his observations on the state of journalism and publishing in Africa.

“Things are getting worse in this market,” Odindo observed, noting circulation numbers are dropping significantly. For instance, the daily Nation in Kenya, which used to sell 230,000 copies a day 10 years ago, now sells about 58,000 to 60,000 copies. Similar declines have been observed in South Africa and other parts of the continent.

This decline has led to drastic actions being taken by business leaders in the media industry and has shaken up the media space, Odindo said: 

“We are seeing now a willingness among the business leaders to make very difficult decisions in reshaping the businesses. We are seeing the impact of this on journalism, the content that media houses generate, but we are also seeing the impact of this on the influence that media exerts in the day-to-day events.”

Many established media businesses are moving from print to purely online platforms, resulting in layoffs.

“We are losing journalists. We are losing a whole variety of skills and as we move into change,” Odindo said.

At the same time, the industry is losing leadership in what he called a “bloodbath” for the profession: “In the time that I’ve been in this industry, I have never seen such changes at the top of media in three years as has now happened.”

That puts the industry in a precarious position as new leaders face greater challenges. In addition to tackling the challenges of business transformation and moving products from legacy to digital to meet new consumption habits for audiences, leaders must also look at how to “crack the subscription nut.”

All these challenges raise the question of who will lead the change.

“We have, for a long time, approached newsroom transformation [and] business renewal in the media as primarily an editorial problem,” Odindo observed. “One of the things these new leaders will have to deal with is the cultural change.”

All of this is happening within the confines of an economy that often can barely afford infrastructure and lacks a labour market with the skills that digital transformation requires. “So the challenge for these new business leaders is actually a lot more magnified than what their colleagues in a developed market would have to deal with.”

The TikTok generation  

Odindo also highlighted the rise of digital activism, particularly among the younger generation. 

He noted the extensive use of platforms like TikTok for mobilisation and said Aga Khan University conducted a study on young media consumers in East Africa. The study showed they do not consume mainstream media because it does not cover areas that matter to them. Surprisingly, 48% of those interviewed had paid for media content, suggesting subscriptions or paywalls can work if executed correctly.

“They’ve reaffirmed what we all know: that the content they will go for will be driven by attractiveness, the availability of that content, its reliability, its relevance, and its affordability,” Odindo said.

“[This] illustrates a point that editors and media managers who are struggling with the strategy of recruiting this generation need to reflect on things we don’t think much about.”

Navigating the post-truth era

African media is grappling with numerous challenges in the post-truth era, Odindo said, highlighting the increasing threat of manipulation campaigns and sophisticated digital attacks aimed at distorting content, particularly during general elections.

“We are having now to look at totally new areas or new threats to journalism or the credibility of our journalism, which in the past we did not know about or which in the past did not matter,” he said, citing the recent Kenyan election as an example.

Kenya was targeted by government-hired spin doctors who used digital techniques to manipulate public opinion — a move believed to have distorted the election results. He also mentioned the case of Uganda, where selective leakages of important but incomplete documents by people in authority are used to influence news reports.

In addition to these challenges, Odindo pointed out the struggle between two Chinese businesses and the Chinese embassy in Uganda. The conflict arose when one business placed an ad in a newspaper, which the embassy disapproved of and asked the media house to remove. This incident underscores the difficulty in determining the truth when different parties dispute what is published in the media.

In response to these challenges, Odindo urged media companies to return to the basics of journalism. He stressed the importance of raising the standards of accuracy, balance, and objectivity in newsrooms across Africa. He also expressed concern about the “brown envelope” phenomenon, referring to bribes offered to journalists and editors to influence the content they put out.

In the digital era, Odindo said there is a need to strengthen the moderation of comments on the sites of credible media houses. He also emphasised the importance of having strong journalistic policies in place as well as a mechanism for enforcing them.

“We are finding ourselves at a stage in the existence of media that the one thing that justifies our existence — credibility — and the fact that now, the main purpose for our existence is that consumers of content out there come to us to crosscheck what they have encountered. We are at a stage where the basics need to be reaffirmed.”

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