Their own story
By Peter Guest | Published: 01 December, 2008
Spurred on by a vacuum of local media content, A24 is fighting to deliver the real Africa to the world.
Leaning against the back wall of Salim Amin’s office in Nairobi, a portrait of his father casts its patrician gaze across the room. One of Africa’s most celebrated photojournalists, the late Mohamed Amin set up the Camerapix photo agency in Dar es Salaam and won universal praise for his coverage of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s. It is his father’s experiences that have driven his son to rework the old agency model into a 21st-century process to give more power to local journalists.
For freelancers in Africa, there are currently few outlets aside from the traditional news agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press, which tend to make a one-off payment for material and take copyright. This, Mr Amin believes, is a disincentive for local talent to invest in their medium. Instead, working with Asif Sheikh, an old school friend, he has created A24, an online portal through which photographers and film makers can sell their work. A24 will edit and verify the content and market non-exclusive country rights to domestic broadcasters around the world.
“Our target audience is not the CNNs, the al-Jazeeras and the BBCs, it’s more the domestic broadcasters around the globe. There’s around 4,500 of them,” Mr Amin says. “They may never get to Africa, they may not have the facility to send crews to Africa. The only African content they have access to is from Reuters or from AP.” 60 percent of any sale goes back to the contributor.
“What’s very important is the type of stories we’re telling,” Mr Sheikh explains. “We’re not a hard news agency. We want to tell the stories that the bigger broadcasters are not telling: the business stories, the cultural stories, the entertainment stories, the sports stories. The research that we’ve done shows that a lot of the small broadcasters from around the world are interested in this kind of content, but where do they go?” Working on a pay-per content, rather than a subscription model, A24 hopes to offer choice to broadcasters worldwide and, in doing so, to allow a more balanced coverage of the continent.
“There is that old saying: ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ That’s what people want to watch, supposedly,” Mr Amin says. “With so many new channels coming out, there is choice. There is room for the more positive side of this continent. There is a hunger for understanding a little bit more about Africa than the doom and gloom. People are tired of the doom and gloom. Another famine, another genocide, another war. We’re not saying that these things don’t exist: we’re not brushing them under the carpet… but let’s tell those stories from an African perspective.”
Mr Amin is, by far, the more animated of the two, and slips quickly from talk of revenue models and throughput of content to address A24’s wider mission: tackling the lack of African voices in the international media and the transience of global interest.
“We have always complained bitterly as Africans that our stories are not being told by ourselves. We’re never given the opportunity… Why can’t we be trusted to tell our own story about our own elections?”
African fixers and journalists have long been used by the international media to facilitate their coverage. Mr Amin cites the example of his father. “His success was based upon the fact that he was born and raised in Africa, and he knew how to get in, and the… BBC correspondents here rode on his contacts to get into places. They took the credit for the stories because theirs was the face on the tube. But the story and the access was got in because an African knew how to get in there.”
As budgets at broadcasters around the world are scaled back, A24’s founders are certain that coverage of Africa will suffer. The BBC has reduced numbers in its global bureaus and only Al-Jazeera of the major international broadcasters has committed to investing in the continent. Reporting on Africa is expensive, and a wide choice of cheap content that can be re-cut and re-voiced in London or New York could be a viable alternative to sending crews half way around the world.
Another part of A24’s mandate is to promote content sharing between African broadcasters. “In Kenya, for example, the broadcasters find it much more cost effective to go buy Desperate Housewives – because it’s seven years old and it only costs them $200 – than to actually get local programming, because they have no access to it and the cost is so high,” he laments. “But the research shows that people… don’t want to watch Desperate Housewives because they can’t relate to it. In Kenya, we don’t have a McDonald’s. If they make a McDonald’s joke, how can we relate to it? They want to watch more local programming. Again, Where do they go to get that local content at a reasonable price?”
By encouraging African broadcasters to upload their content, A24 hopes that they will be able to generate revenue away from advertising-led models, as well as promoting better understanding between continental neighbours. “One thing we want to do with A24 is to highlight the successes of projects in different countries, so that those can be duplicated. At the same time, we want to cover the failures in other countries, so that we don’t duplicate them,” Mr Amin says.
“The one thing we do have in common on this continent is our problems. Our problems are pretty much the same around Africa, from corruption to HIV, to women’s education, to sanitation, water – we have similar problems.”
Aside from giving broadcasters an additional revenue stream, this initiative may address a deeper concern. “The €60 ($78) tape where [broadcasters] store the footage is more valuable than the content,” Mr Sheikh says. “They do this week’s programming, then when next week comes they erase last weeks and redo it. We’re losing our history because nobody’s storing our content.”
