Stephanie Busari (SBB Media) - Why local journalism matters? | Media in Africa #3

A proof-of-life video for the Chibok girls, handed to the one reporter still phoning their mothers two years after the news cycle moved on. Rwanda's logo on a Premier League shirt, and the outrage of people who had been told it was a poor country. And a flat verdict on the platforms that carry Africa's stories to the world: they were never built for us. In the third episode of Media in Africa, Georja Calvin-Smith talks with Stephanie Busari, founder of SBB Media and previously head of CNN's bureau in Lagos, about what actually changes when the people telling Africa's stories are from there. Drawing on twenty-five years that ran from a London community paper to the Daily Mirror's showbiz column to the CNN bureau in Lagos, Stephanie maps the landscape: why a fixer will never contradict the correspondent who hired them, how Kenyans on Twitter forced a global network into an apology, what it took to be handed the Chibok proof-of-life video and why it was offered to her rather than sought, why Rwanda's rebrand worked, what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's danger of a single story looks like from inside a newsroom, and why she now builds her own platforms instead of arguing with somebody else's. Plus, as every episode: Stephanie's nerd fact, which involves an obsession with words and a great deal of Scrabble. Media in Africa is a ten-part podcast by Meridian17, a Dutch-South African think and do tank, produced in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Media Programme Sub-Saharan Africa. New episodes weekly. Full video episodes: www.youtube.com/@meridian17org All platforms and more: meridian17.org/podcast Follow @meridian17org on Instagram and TikTok. © 2026 Meridian17 NPC. All rights reserved.