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. Growing numbers of people get their news via videos on social networks such as TikTok, Instagram and—above all—YouTube. That is particularly true in the global south—and especially in Africa (see chart), according to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a research centre and think-tank at Oxford University. More people in Kenya get their news from YouTube than those in any other country surveyed by the institute. “The trends in media consumption which people say are coming to the West are already well under way in the global south,” notes Nic Newman of the Reuters Institute.
People-led News in Demand in Africa
