A vision for African news in Germany

‘Pambazuka News’ is something of a misnomer. The Newsletter and Homepage are a pristine source for long-form articles, shedding light into complex issues, digging up underreported developments and providing a critical perspective. But there is a difference between what Pambazuka does and what people usually refer to as ‘news’ and which is delivered by some of the most visited pages on the web, like the BBC, the Guardian and Spiegel Online.

These news sites offer a predictable and constant coverage on a variety of topics, updating frequently and providing short to medium sized articles. As in all media, different providers cater to different tastes and everybody can usually find a suitable source of information, no matter the preferred language, interests or political leanings.

One of the few exceptions in this regard is the lack of quality coverage of African news in Germany. While there are a range of monthly publications covering the continent, like Africa Positive, Afrika post or Afrika Bulletin, daily newspapers, television channels and their online counterparts are uniform in their unwillingness to provide up-to-date, carefully researched and well-informed coverage of the continent.

I’m hardly the first to notice this unfortunate state of affairs and the underrepresentation of Africa in German news is periodically lamented by much higher profile professionals than me. The usual defence of the media is the lack of interest the German public displays towards African affairs. Germany, getting late into the great game of colonization and losing all its colonies after World War I, has never developed the intense economic, political, historical and linguistic relationship that the US, Great Britain or France enjoy with the African continent.

THE INTEREST IS THERE

But of course there are thousands of people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland that are highly interested in African affairs. Between 400,000 and 800,000 people in Germany alone have African ancestry. Probably an equal number has African spouses, worked in African countries or has some other kind of special relationship to the continent. Not all of them will be interested in news from the continent and some of those might be happy to consume news in a foreign language, like English or French. But this still leaves a large group of people whose interest in the continent is not served by the current media market.

I want to offer this group the first high-quality German language news source for African affairs. The project, called AfrikaEcho and reachable under http://www.AfrikaEcho.de, has been in existence for several months now and during this pilot phase, we got a wave of positive feedback from our readers. The goal is to offer an online news source that covers the whole continent and all topics, ranging from politics to culture and economy to development. We take a critical and opinionated look at African news, but concentrate on short to medium length articles, which we complement with links to our sources (like Pambazuka) and additional information around the internet, maps and live blogs.

PAYING FOR NEWS

Of course, the sticking point is how to pay for this kind of venture. Like Pambazuka, most established African affairs magazines in Germany rely on some kind of subsidy, either from donations or public budgets. We want to try a different solution.

Financially, a project like AfrikaEcho is confronted with two challenges. First, we have to find a lump sum to finance the initial investment and start-up time. Second, long-term economic viability has to be established in some kind of way.

For the latter, newspapers and online media traditionally rely on advertising and subscriptions. Unfortunately, Africa is not a particularly marketable topic. It’s hard to generate leads for the sale of iPhone accessories from people reading an article on the film festival in Ouagadougou. This leaves subscriptions, but these present a problem: While we think that there are enough people out there willing to pay for German-language African news, its hard to come up with the right pricing scheme. Eternally broke students would balk at anything over five Euros per month, while others might have deeper pockets. Additionally, nobody likes to be forced to hand over his money for something that might also be available for free, somewhere on the internet, which is why subscriptions have traditionally fared poorly online.

LET THE CROWD PAY WHAT IT WANTS

We will try to solve this conundrum with a simple trick. We will leave it to the reader to decide how much he or she pays. Readers will have to pay something, but whether they pay one Euro or a hundred per month, will be up to them. We hope that this ‘pay as you want’ scheme will increase willingness to pay, as well as getting even people with relatively low interest in the African continent involved with the content we put out there.

This leaves the issue of starting capital, which will include the funds necessary to develop the technical solution needed for this kind of subscription scheme. For this we want to try something innovative as well: crowdfunding. Made famous by US-based platform kickstarter, crowdfunding is a new form of communal financing. Basically, many people chip in to make an idea happen. In return, they get a project-related reward, once the idea has been realised, differentiating from a simple donation. Crucially, only ideas that raise the minimum amount of realisation receive any money. If they fall short, all supporters get their money back.

AfrikaEcho will reward supporters of its €15,000 crowdfunding for example with the chance to have a topic of their preference researched by our staff, or even to define one of our long-term reporting focuses. We hope that will lead us to discover issues and angles that wouldn’t have occurred to us otherwise. Supporters will also have the opportunity (depending on the extend of their support) to become a member of AfrikaEcho’s board of advisors and even to join one of our staff on a reporting trip to Africa.

We think that this kind of approach to financing could prove to be successful for niche-journalism in general, but our main hope is that it enables us to have a real impact on the way Africa is covered in Germany - in quantity as well as in substance. Of course, a crowdfunding campaign has little hope to succeed, if nobody hears about it. We would therefore like to encourage you to share this article and the web address where you can support AfrikaEcho, http://www.startnext.de/afrikaecho, with any and all German speakers interested in Africa you know. Together, we could make a real difference in shaping the continent’s image in German media.

* Peter Dörrie is a freelance journalist from Germany. He has studied development, peace and conflict studies in Germany and Britain and travelled, researched and lived in eleven African countries. In mid-2012 he founded AfrikaEcho, the first German-language news site focussing on the African continent.