Middle East & Africa | Click click boom

YouTube in Africa offers a new kind of news

Demographics and the weakness of traditional media explain the rise of video news

A woman uses her mobile phone as she travels in the Blue Line Rail's train.
News to herPhotograph: Reuters
|Dakar and Nairobi

Salam madior fall has been a pioneer more than once. In 1999, while studying in America, he and a friend founded Seneweb, one of the first websites devoted to news from Senegal, his home. By 2002 Seneweb was the most visited news site in Francophone Africa. In the late 2000s, media firms there still focused on satellite television. Mr Fall thought that setting up “a fully-fledged tv channel would be going backwards”. So in 2012 he started putting news videos on YouTube. Today, Seneweb’s headquarters in Dakar has more than 100 employees, plans to expand across West Africa, and has correspondents as far afield as Europe and America.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Click click boom”

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