by Mandy de Waal (@mandyldewaal) It has been just over a year since Zimbabwean-born media entrepreneur, Trevor Ncube, launched Mail & Guardian Africa.
The chairperson of Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) — the company that owns Zimbabwean daily NewsDay, business weekly The Zimbabwe Independent, as well as a weekly called The Standard — says its success must be defined in terms of the investigative-news brand’s editorial achievements.
Goal
“Our goal was that in the first phase we should have the main countries with large populations and economies all being in the top 20,” writes Ncube in an email to MarkLives.com. Here the media man discusses attracting the right audience to M&G Africa.
“We have Kenya and South Africa swapping places as the top sources of our traffic, then you have the USA, UK coming, and then a break with Ethiopia, Namibia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia all in the top 20,” says Ncube, who is the chief executive of both M&G and M&G Africa. “We had planned to hit 300 000 in the middle of the second or third year, [but] we got there in our first year,” he says.
According to Ncube, he started M&G Africa because he strongly believes that it is time “Africans told their own stories instead of depending on foreign media”. The idea behind the title is to enrich the conversation about Africa and to improve decision making about the continent by contributing data. On this score, he claims that his media does the “best data journalism on the continent right now”.
Shares
Both M&G and M&G Africa belong to M&G Media Limited, in which Ncube has a 77.69% share. The remaining shares are owned by a staff share trust and the Media Development Investment Fund.
Ncube’s vision for the Pan-African title is to present historical facts in interesting ways to help establish context for the current realties that this continent faces.
“While Pan-African journalism was being done, there was no purely owned and continental-based effort, [that was] not backed by donor funds, which was a stand-alone digital platform. The rest of the serious efforts were based in Europe or North America,” he says.
M&G Africa covers the continent in its entirety – a mammoth effort. How does the media brand achieve taking on this scale and scope?
Two aspects
“There are two aspects to this. There is the ‘boots on the ground’. How many contributors do you have on the ground? While this is important, we think in the digital age, it is less critical. So, basically through mining blogs and social media, we have a list of the most-thoughtful voices in most countries, and we reach out to them when we need to,” he details, adding that the title has nine full-time media workers based in Johannesburg and Nairobi, Kenya.
The news site also sends people into high-news areas to cover stories, but, says Ncube, “The most important coverage for us, though, is the thematic.” In his response, the words ‘important’ and ‘thematic’ are stressed.
“We think certain things — like open borders, environment, infrastructure, popular culture, democratisation — are important, and we do this not through news stories, but value-adds — the activity on which we spend the most time,” explains Ncube, saying that a case in point is the launch of the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA).
TFTA coverage
Brought into being in June 2015, when 26 African countries signed a US$1trn trade agreement, in population terms the Tripartite Free Trade Area is bigger than the European Union (EU). According to the Washington DC think tank: “The TFTA will have a combined population of 625 million people, and an aggregate GDP of US$1 trillion covering 58 percent of the continent’s economic activity.”
“While everyone will cover that [the TFTA launch], we have gone basically 50 years back and through a list article, summarised the state of intra-Africa, with lots of data. It is [with] this research and background that we make our signature,” Ncube says.
The big stories that M&G Africa has been focusing on include the xenophobic attacks in SA, the elections in Nigeria and the drowning of immigrants in the Mediterranean, as well as Boko Haram and terrorism on the continent. “The really big ones [stories] that get huge shares are the value-adds,” he states.
Data and infographics
The media entrepreneur elaborates: “We got a big bump from a story on popular foods; another on the state of African soils and what it means about the future; also we did a report on Africa’s population in the years to come that was very popular, as was one on endangered species; and rather dramatically, on the history of African incumbents who had lost and given up power since the 1960s — following the opposition Muhammadu Buhari’s defeat of then president Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria’s March elections.”
A key feature of M&G Africa’s work is the data and infographics that accompany stories.
Ncube won’t be drawn about M&G Africa’s financial performance. Questions about whether the operation is running at a profit or break-even is met with a firm “No comment.”
Who reads M&G Africa? A third of the site’s audience – by far the largest portion of its readers – falls in the 25-34 year-old category. The next biggest readership is between the ages of 35-44. Ncube says that readers are mostly young professionals, graduate students, and people who work on Africa policy issues from all over the world.
Second phase
“In the second phase, we shall introduce more languages, roll out mobile and tablet apps, and deepen content offerings in a redesign. We think we shall turbocharge audience growth with that.”
If you’ve been to the site, you’ll see that mgafrica.com‘s slogan is “African Truth”. “The slogan means we shall tell the good stories of the continent, and the bad ones,” says Ncube. who is a fierce, outspoken critic of bad government. This has landed him in hot water with Bob Mugabe and hasn’t won him favour in SA, either.
“There is a lot of push to ‘tell positive African stories’, and we wanted to signal that we are not part of that. We think Africa should not be patronised. It is intelligent and grown up to celebrate its achievements, and to take a blow on the chin over its failures.”
Africa needs independent news brands, based on the continent, that report without fear or favour. A luta continua, vitória é certa, M&G Africa. As the struggle for free and independent media in Africa continues, may the M&G’s success be certain.
Read more:
- Very chilling Afrophobia in South Africa: ‘You Africans really abuse our hospitality’ in Mail & Guardian Africa.
- Innovative leader has to keep its sights on the future by Nic Dawes in Mail & Guardian.
Mandy de Waal is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. Follow her on Twitter at @mandyldewaal or at MandyLdeWaal [@] gmail.com.
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