Waititu prepares to report from Africa

JSchool alumnus (MSJ '07) Ernest Waititu saw a problem with the coverage of news from Africa. He wanted to do something to fix this problem instead of just standing by wondering why African news was not getting coverage in U.S. media.

Waititu talks about his trip in this video. Check out his Web site: afrikanews.org.

Waititu was doing research on under-covered news for his master's project. His research stemmed from his early days in the U.S. (2003) when he noticed how hard it was to get international news, especially from Africa. He didn’t understand why international media organizations were not picking up events happening in Africa.

Waititu proposed establishing Afrikanews.org to provide more coverage of otherwise under-covered news from Africa. Waititu took matters into his own hands and created Afrikanews.org as part of his masters program at Scripps.

“Afrikanews.org is primarily dedicated to coverage of under-covered news from Africa. We aggregate content from different sites that have a considerable amount of news from Africa,” Ernest said. “Also, we work with journalists in and out of the continent to provide content in the way of news and/or opinion.”

The site highlights stories every month from Africa. The site utilizes RSS to get the most recent news from Africa. According to the site, it is “reaching out to common people on the streets and providing them with an avenue from which their opinion and news can be accessed. It also aims to promote blogging in cities and towns around Africa.

"More bloggers on the continent will ensure a steady flow of information on the site and boost the coverage of Africa." Lydia Gutierrez