YouTube in Africa offers a new kind of news
Demographics and the weakness of traditional media explain the rise of video news
Salam madior fall has been a pioneer more than once. In 1999, while studying in America, he and a friend founded Seneweb, one of the first websites devoted to news from Senegal, his home. By 2002 Seneweb was the most visited news site in Francophone Africa. In the late 2000s, media firms there still focused on satellite television. Mr Fall thought that setting up “a fully-fledged tv channel would be going backwards”. So in 2012 he started putting news videos on YouTube. Today, Seneweb’s headquarters in Dakar has more than 100 employees, plans to expand across West Africa, and has correspondents as far afield as Europe and America.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Click click boom”
Middle East & Africa August 24th 2024
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- Making love not war in the Middle East
- A shift towards green investment is under way in Africa
- In Congo, a desperate struggle to control the deadly mpox outbreak
- YouTube in Africa offers a new kind of news
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