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.”
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this