Media in Africa

Drawing on more than two decades of reporting, most of it by bus and motorbike rather than by hired car, Ruud maps the landscape: why he calls the buying and selling of African stories a kind of colonialism, and names the one funder he thinks got it right, how a coffee shop in an empty mall turns into a story about geopolitics, why a Kenyan journalist can reach places he cannot and why their own state is the harder obstacle, what he would spend a million euros on if it were handed to him for African voices, why putting the same story in a vertical format is not what the big broadcasters should be learning from Nairobi's creators, and how the story about Africans training AI models gets told wrong. Plus, as every episode: Ruud's nerd fact, which involves chains, caps and a late discovery of fashion. 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.

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.

A DRC bond issue four times oversubscribed, not because investors believed in the country but because the risk priced into it paid so well. A thousand people in the US and the UK who would buy a painting from Africa, but not a computer and not a medicine. And a bill, $4.2 billion, for what the world's coverage adds to the continent's cost of borrowing. In the second episode of Media in Africa, Georja Calvin-Smith talks with Moky Makura, Executive Director of Africa No Filter, the narrative-change organisation she has led since it launched six years ago, about what the story of a broken continent actually costs, and who benefits from keeping it in place. Drawing on Africa No Filter's own research, from the Global Media Index to a study of stereotypes run with the University of Bath, Moky maps the landscape: why the risk premium survives even where the data does not support it, how a four-times oversubscribed bond can be bad news, where the big American titles rank against the Guardian on African coverage, what a thousand consumers in the US and UK will and will not buy from the continent, why her not-for-profit news agency Bird gives its journalism away, and how the same protest becomes either chaos or agency depending on who you cast as the hero. Plus, as every episode: Moky's nerd fact, which involves collapsing DIY shelves and a saved Instagram album of cleaning videos. 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.

Data so expensive that people choose between connectivity and food. Newsrooms pressured not by censors with scissors, but by governments quietly pulling advertising. And a creator economy about to boom precisely because it travels light. In the first episode of Media in Africa, Georja Calvin-Smith talks with Lisa MacLeod, Director and Head of News Clients at FT Strategies, the Financial Times' consulting arm, about what actually separates Europe's media market from Africa's, and what doesn't. Drawing on her work with publishers from News24 to Kenya's Nation Media Group, Lisa maps the landscape: why Android, SMS and WhatsApp shape African distribution, how "soft censorship" erodes accountability journalism, where on the continent press freedom is strongest, what the Hanifa Adan case says about legacy media working with news creators, and why visa policy may be the most underrated media policy of all. Plus, as every episode: Lisa's nerd fact, which involves bacterial fermentation. 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. 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.