The Future of Media in Africa.

The media landscape in Africa is changing in great ways. The print, broadcast, and online platforms are rapidly converging, and this will present serious challenges to the future of media in Africa. To start with, not many countries have safeguarded media freedoms. For example, the world continues to appeal to the Egyptian authorities to release the jailed Al-Jazeera Journalists. The media freedoms in countries such as Ethiopia is also pretty low, and the country in the last few years has jailed dozens of journalists who were opposed to the government. Eritrea and Djibouti are also not high up on the ranking of press freedom in Africa.

However, a new challenge is emerging in that the media freedoms will not be curtailed by the government, but rather by advertisers. The threat from advertisers is pretty real, as the lifeblood of any media house is advertising. In this sense then, public broadcasters could be of great help. Unshackled by the need to
maintain advertiser relations, public broadcasters could provide useful information and entertainment, especially in areas where the private media do not usually want to venture into.

Online media is also another growing field, and we must ask whether we truly are prepared for this new form of media. While users are trooping online, they are not as willing to pay for content. Perhaps, here, African media could follow the example of New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which have paywalls. In the case of New York Times, a reader gets to read a certain number of articles for free, after which he pays a subscription fee every month to continue reading the rest of the articles. Media practitioners from all over the world are watching to see how these two media entities will fare on, and since the future is digital, African media houses will do well to have appropriate digital strategies.