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.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition