Late one night, South African journalist Simon Allison woke up his wife with an idea: a weekly African newspaper for Africans, distributed through WhatsApp.
She told him to go back to sleep, and “keep it for the morning,” but that was the birth of The Continent, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even though it is published as a PDF and distributed on a messaging platform, The Continent feels like an old-fashioned newspaper: catchy headlines, short stories, reported pieces and interviews.
Photo: AFP
It is also free and available only through WhatsApp, the most widely used messaging system in Africa.
Zimbabwean daily 263Chat was the trendsetter in sharing newspapers on WhatsApp, Allison said during an interview at his suburban Johannesburg house.
“We wanted to create a newspaper, not a Web site,” he said.
Kiri Rupiah, 34, the team’s distributor and “geek,” said that the paper has helped to filter the deluge of information that came with the uncertainties of the pandemic.
“Our families started using us as informal fact-checkers. ‘Is this true about COVID?’ And all these exchanges were happening on WhatsApp,” Rupiah said.
“We are different than most newsrooms who want lots of subscribers,” she said. “I want 10 people who are engaged, that are going to share with six or seven people they know.”
“They also have access to us,” she added. “It creates community and trust.”
A university professor was one of their first fans.
“He shares the newspaper every week with 50 people,” and because he recommends it, they are likely to read it, Rupiah said.
She has cellphone numbers of all of the nearly 17,000 subscribers, even receiving “a nude by mistake” from one overeager subscriber.
“He was super apologetic,” Rupiah said.
Barely two weeks passed from that first, late-night idea and the first issue in April 2020, said the bespectacled Allison, who converted his guest room into the newspaper office.
He had help from three journalism students, who were happy to keep busy during the pandemic, and hired a few freelancers, paying them from his own pocket for the first few months.
The debut edition went out to friends and family, but “after 48 hours, we had 1,000 subscribers. We achieved virality in a week,” Allison said.
At the time he was the Africa editor of the Mail & Guardian, a dynamic South African weekly.
With his cofounder Sipho Kings, they went fundraising, with pro-democracy charities chipping in.
“Funders see us as a weapon against disinformation, an innovative way to combat it,” he said.
They have enough funding to cover tightly budgeted operating costs over the next two years, they said.
The energetic team of journalists in their 30s — based mostly in South Africa, but also in Uganda and the UK — is teeming with story ideas.
“If we had more funding we could do more fun things,” said Allison, who wants to launch a French or even a Kiswahili edition.
He said he is proud of some of their groundbreaking work so far.
One of their notable stories came in February last year, under the headline: “The country where COVID doesn’t exist.” It looked at Tanzania, where the president had declared that COVID-19 did not exist — even as hospitals and cemeteries were overflowing.
Distributing through WhatsApp is fast and convenient, but also protects against censorship.
“Governments can censor print, Web site as well. That’s pretty easy,” Allison said. “But WhatsApp messages encrypted and published from South Africa, which has strict media laws ... there is no way to censor.”
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