“If you say something happens in a place like Marikana [South Africa], for us to send a team of journalists to cover it directly it would be too expensive. I do think it’s a problem. When foreigners come here they may paint somehow a different picture from the way Africans can see things happening.”
African journalism needs a light at the end of the tunnel, that’s for certain.
Western news outlets report almost all news on Africa, you know, the big with enough money to send a French journalist to Angola and back for a few hours. The continent’s newspapers are overwhelmingly under resourced and underfunded. At Pambazuka, South African journalist Simon Allison explains how and why the state of African journalism is so devastating and what solutions are out there to fix it.
