AN AFRICAN VANTAGE ON A EUROPEAN WAR: THE CONTINENT.

• Author: Namubiru, Lydia

The Continent is a digital-only pan-African newspaper covering regional and global events from an African perspective. The Journal spoke with Lydia Namubira, the incoming editor-in-chief of The Continent, which is currently based in South Africa. The discussion covers the nature of the newspaper's reporting, the difficulty of articulating the African perspective on the invasion of Ukraine, and the war's downstream effects on the people and politics of the continent.

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): The Continent utilizes an innovative, digital-only format. Who, then, is the readership? Who is the audience?

Lydia Namubiru (LN): The Continent is a fully-mobile publication for people to receive and read it on mobile, but it is not a mobile site: it's an actual newspaper that you receive on your phone. It's designed to be readable on a small device, which is how most Africans access the Internet. For the vast majority of Africans, their primary computer--and perhaps now for most people in the world--is their phone. For a lot of African readers, this might also be their only computer.

The publication itself is many things. I think the thing that's most outstanding about it is that it's designed to be distributed via customer messaging apps like WhatsApp. To add a distribution model is primarily to focus on people who want to receive the paper by WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram, some of the most popular electronic communication apps on the African continent, where more people have a WhatsApp account than have an email address. You know, on the continent, we have some governments that still use Yahoo. Some government officials might give you a Yahoo email, so unlike in the West, in the U.S. or UK, email is not a big thing. If we were a mobile site, it would not be as effective a way to get an audience to read it, because I think that for many Africans readers, the Internet is their personal messaging apps and then social media sites. One of the things is a distribution model, and then the fact that we design a newspaper for the mobile phone. When I say newspaper, I mean a newspaper for hard copy, where there's a front page of stories with pictures laid out and captions. The experience this time is digital.

The other interesting thing about us is how we came to be. In April 2020, we were witnessing large amounts of misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, the so-called "infodemic." Again, for African communities, because WhatsApp and social media are primarily their experience of the Internet, that world of misinformation was being shared over WhatsApp. The argument came to be, "Well, of course this makes a lot of sense that people are trying to share information about COVID-19, because there was no information," but there was also a very real threat. With my colleagues who founded the paper (I joined a few months after), we thought, let's produce a newspaper for these platforms, so that people have something to share, to fill this need for information with credible news and creative information. That's another peculiarity about how we came to be, which was seeing how people needed very context-specific information and then producing a newspaper for that context.

The third way is in how what we've come to be seen as and therefore what we aspire to be: an African voice in global media, an African newspaper that is Africa-centric, Africa-facing, covering Africa when we cover the world. We cover the world for an African audience, first and foremost, and that's because we've come to be seen as that. This also has come out with our audience: people who are smart, educated, middle class--whatever that means in an African context--people who have access to global media and a general disillusion with how things are covered or not covered in global media. In that sense, The Continent came to be a response to the conversation that had been going on about how local media very poorly covers Africa. It's a couple companies unconcerned with if Africans even want to read those stories, and so it's indifferent in terms of how stories are told and which pictures it uses. It does not imagine an African seeing that picture or think about how it frames Africa as this exotic place and simplifies them. We can to be that tool, a national publication that covers Africa and treats it with seriousness. It is everything that we want to see in covering events from the outside. That's generally The Continent. It's produced by a very small team of about nine people with a verv large network of three dozen contributors from across Africa.

JIA: Is the readership cultivated by word of mouth? What about international readership?

LN: About two-thirds of the people who read the paper are located in Africa.

It's in two tiers: the people who directly subscribe to us, and that's who receives the paper every weekend, and then there's also primary subscribers who have shared it. We do a reader survey every year, and from that we know that about 100,000 people read the paper. That's a combination of direct subscribers and the extent to which those direct subscribers tell us that they share the paper out. They tend to be the urban educated, which is not unusual for a newspaper because it's written in English. We do try to publish in languages like Swahili and French, but not a lot, not as much as would like to, given the size of the team. Primarily, we are an Englishlanguage newspaper. You do have to have been educated, and generally not...