African news companies are traversing digital transformation like other news companies around the world, centering that transformation around AI, mobile apps, social video.

During the recent INMA Africa News Media Summit, executives from Business Insider Africa, Citizen Digital, and Media24 shared their challenges and successes during this transformative time for media on the continent.

Business Insider Africa’s social video strategy

Victor Oluwole, head and editor of Business Insider Africa, has revolutionised the way the Nigerian company does its work on the continent.

He upped pageviews from 100,000 pageviews a month to nearly 3.5 million per month, generated hundreds of thousands of readers, and dominated the Google search page for the brand.

How did he do it?

“[We] identify content our audience would love and interact with. This is a major role in the analytics that we use… our understanding of this drives pageviews onto the platform,” he said, emphasising the dynamic ways in which Business Insider Africa adapts to new changes in the continent’s scene.

The brand has also adapted its activities to be better suited for social media. This is done most notably through videos. On Facebook, they emphasise the quality of the videos they output, showcasing the work their team has done in providing quality content, including documentaries.

“If the quality of the video is not appealing, it’s easier for people to just swipe.”

On Instagram, meanwhile, they adapt the stories they have to be easily viewable.They want their content to be discussed, shared, and the focus of the popular discourse at a given time.

Through the way people share and talk about this content online, it functions as almost a “mini survey” of the type of content that people are looking for from their site.

What they find is that stories tailored for specific social media platforms do much better than stories that have no specific focus. Figuring out how your audience interacts with your story can revolutionise the way in which they engage with your news media.

“We try to simplify in a way that they can easily consume this content,” he said. “We’re trying to stay on top of hot topics that keeps our readers engaged.”

A prime candidate for the type of story that meets this goal is interviews. Talking with some of the biggest leaders and game changers in the continent truly changes the way in which people view and understand their stories.

Since they cover dozens of countries across a whole continent, they try to focus especially on which countries provide the most readership. For them, this is Nigeria, where over 60% of their business comes from. Through work done in their brand, they’ve managed to make themselves into the most trusted leader in the country.

Royal Media Services’ app success

Carol Wachira, marketing director at Royal Media Services, plays a key role in helping the company expand its reach in becoming one of the most influential news media brands in the continent. 

This is no easy feat. The company owns three TV news stations, five digital news platforms, and 13 radio stations, encompassing a huge portion of the continent’s news.

“Our content approach took us from zero to hero,” she said, emphasising the broad reach that the company has. “[We] connect with different languages. Our biggest task was building our digital platforms today.”

In Kenya, they comprise over 70% of the market share for news media. This reach becomes more influential and more important as Kenya grows as an economy and becomes one of the dominant powerhouses of the many African nations. They also dominate almost 50% of the market share for radio media.

One way the company expands this reach is through Citizen Digital, an app that combines its news platforms into one giant service, letting people figure out what content they want out of the broad selection that they offer. Additionally, they focus heavily on the reach their Web site has.

“We focused on a broader base of news coverage … giving us an opportunity to grow and at the same time providing bite-sized news for the consumer and the online space,” Wachira said.

They were able to glean many market insights by figuring out how this all integrates into the digital media space. They determined what consumers want and how they can best provide that in the niche for their specific sites.

They also made room for more human interest stories, listening to the market feedback on what it is that people actually want from the site.

“The launch of Citizen Digital allowed us to open up a portal to what citizens want. It empowers the audience to use their phones to capture what’s around them” while focusing on the citizen journalism aspect of the app that allows people to take on stories of their own and also integrating those into coverage provided by official news sites.

“On the journey, we learned a lot about content adaptation in the digital space. We come from a really successful environment and having to relearn how to package content in the digital space … we want a balance in providing our longform digital news … and being able to provide short bite-sized videos on the go.”

She also emphasised how editors across different mediums work as a team, integrating each news source across multiple different mediums to allow for the broadest reach. Their digital-first approach allows for the best integration of all their different services.

Social media also plays a heavy role in generating growth for the company. The more people talk about stories and share them, the more people use Citizen Digital and integrate that into their existing social media experience, the more the reach of Royal Media Services expands.

And now? 

They have millions of followers across all platforms, having reached nearly two billion total views on YouTube. They’ve changed their identity completely as a news service, and it paid off in total revenue generated.

The app is now the No. 1 news app in Africa for three years running.

RMS has even started engaging live streaming to have better reach for the overall population. They’ve integrated this into behind-the-scenes Artificial Intelligence services that allow them to figure out where to place advertisements to get the best engagement from the overall populace, and they can even convert text stories to audio.

They’re launching e-commerce channels, free ad streaming TV channels (FAST channels), and plan to launch events like gaming and esports — overall expanding the style of content they’re producing.

“We do not know the answers of what digital features look like for each of us … digital media is a key component for us in terms of our growth.” 

Media24’s expansion across the continent

Charlene Rolls holds a unique position in Media24 as the head of Artificial Intelligence. This is new for the news industry as a whole, as Artificial intelligence changes the game entirely for how media analytics and the back-end of news media functions.

In the beginning, Media24 had no clue how to start its AI journey. “We didn’t really know what we didn’t know,” Rolls said. “Should we use chatbots, should we use models ... we didn’t know.”

But they went through a journey that taught them the invaluable role AI can play.

“If you’re just starting out and don’t know what’s going on, that’s absolutely normal. You’re trying to pick out what the best thing for your business is and how to use AI.”

Rolls emphasised forming a “Gen AI circle” of people from across the company to figure out collective needs and desires for AI, how it can help, and how it can be best integrated into existing news platforms. Needs will vary as a marketing person versus what you need as a tech person, for instance, and forming this circle to communicate can play a key role in forming a strategy for handling AI.

They’ve been using something called Toqan AI, a similar programme to ChatGPT. 

“It’s like a personal AI assistant,” Rolls said. “It’s used a lot in transcription so journalists can … quickly process hours and hours of work.” It can help with data analysis, e-mails, marketing research, etc.

Most of Rolls’ newsroom now has access to Toqan and regularly uses it in their day-to-day work. This can be a very good way to start, but it’s not everything. Teams also need practical guides to be learn how it’s used, so Media24 created such a guide for how AI can be used in different departments.

Media24 also has workshops built off of these this guide, teaching people how to use AI. Employees can participate in these workshops to learn more about the processes and can also reach out to her for more information on how to access technologies like Toqan.

Above all else though, news companies should have fun with AI, she said. There’s so much it can be used for, Rolls emphasised, so “play with it and see what it turns up.” At Media24, they’ve had art competitions and hackathons using AI.

AI can be “huge” in what it does once it has a purpose in a news company, she said: “Keep the conversation going. The more people talk about it, the more normal [it is].”

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