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Africa’s new rolling news channel

The growth of 24-hour news channels across the world is accelerating at a staggering rate when you consider that only a few years ago the genre was dominated by CNN and the BBC. Russia, France, and the Arabic world, through Al-Jazeera, now have their own take on the world. If you add news and social networking websites then there is no shortage of global information out there.

But there is one yawning gap in this scenario — Africa. A continent of 53 nations and 10 per cent of the world’s population, it has no TV channel to call its own. It relies on others to tell its story.

A new channel, A24, plans to change all that, mostly through the efforts of Salim Amin, the son of the late Mohamed Amin, a Kenyan cameraman best known for his coverage of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, when he teamed up with the BBC’s Michael Buerk to show the world the extent of that country’s suffering.

Mr. Salim Amin has been working with a handful of other journalists to raise funds for Africa’s first independent news channel. For years, a news channel has been beyond the reach of any media organisation in Africa. Now, however, satellite and coverage costs, through new technology and the Internet, make A24 a dream within reach. An announcement that the venture is ready to start is expected shortly.

The channel will offer breaking news, analysis, and a platform for sharing ideas among Africans from across the continent and beyond. It will use a range of distribution methods and the channel bosses plan to encourage its audience to send user-generated content to its Nairobi headquarters.

Eventually, A24 will run 46 news bureaux across the continent. As well as reporting the big stories, they will focus on areas that all too often fail to make the news elsewhere. Subjects such as business and economic growth, politics and governance, and healthcare and culture. A24 will cover both the uplifting as well as the depressing news from Africa.

The channel will be editorially independent and plans to train its own journalists through the A24 Foundation with the help of Norway’s Gimlekollen School of Journalism. The foundation will coordinate this training in cooperation with universities and institutes in South Africa, Ethiopia, and Kenya as well as major TV news agencies.

A24 is in discussion with international broadcasters and partners about content-sharing, distribution and support, and the channel’s two founders, Mr. Amin and managing director Daniel Rivkin, plan to roll the channel out both online and on television during next year. “A24 will make a difference because it will create a new kind of voice,” says Mr. Amin. “It will be truly African, beyond local politics and beyond prejudices.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

(The writer is editorial advisory board chairman of A24 and a former managing director of CNN International.)

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