In some parts of Africa the media is horribly flawed. Reporters ignore factual information in favor for what wins them government deals, protects officials or serves some other self-serving purpose and transparency is a myth. This is because unlike in many democracies, the media isn’t completely insulated from the state. That is to say that the government still has oversight over journalists and there are no sufficient protections that prevent intimidation. Until the press is decoupled from governments and there truly is ‘freedom of the press’, things won’t change. Citizen journalism provides one solution by allowing communities to write and read about the stories they care about. Spot.us, Demotix and Associated Content are all examples. But what these services don’t address is information dissemination, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Only around ten percent of the population in Africa have access to reliable electricity with only around 1% having access to the internet. Radio still rules as the primary way to get information to large groups of people at once. With the continent being the fastest growing, deeply penetrated, mobile phone markets in the world, it’s only natural that it’s quickly supplanting radio as the tool some organizations are using to get information out. To truly “democratize” information, we have to think of new ways to get it into the hands of people who need it most.

Ideas for RSS Content Generation and Distribution

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way to keep people updated with information from news sources, blogs and other publications on the web. Currently there’s no easy way to reach people who aren’t ‘connected’ with the internet, but it doesn’t make that information any less relevent. This post brainstorms on some potential methods for using RSS to serve the mainstream, beyond the areas where computing is abundant.

RSS to SMS

Mobile penetration in Africa is incredibly high. 30% to 100% in some countries. One of the most effective ways to reach people, perhaps is to offer RSS as SMS headlines. But headlines don’t communicate a great deal of information and are often misleading, 140 word summaries (AP-style) would be more effective. Users opt-in by SMS code. They are then asked to respond to a short form asking which language they prefer, and which topics they’re interested in. The key here is to limit selection to no more than four or five things at a time, as too much choice can be paralyzing.

The sender covers costs by sending advertisements incrementally (every five or ten messages). Or by selling their “reach” to Advertisers like newspapers have done for two centuries. Alternatively, users could pay for the service.

RSS to Print/Newsletter/Magazine

Old media still has it’s virtues. It can reach those who have the least as easily as it can reach the middle class and wealthy. It’s also viral by nature (how many times is that 2007 copy of Newsweek at the dentist office read?) It’s archival, it’s portable and it’s tangible. It’s cyclical, drives traffic to a website, the web drives traffic to print circulation (but don’t tell that to PC Magazine).

Unlike a traditional newsletter, content would be written by people all over the globe who opt-in (via the Creative Commons) to have their blogs eligible for re-print. An editor would select stories relevant to the focus and vet articles for inaccuracies.

How do you monetize it? Advertising, subscription and selling to distributors (the Newspaper/Magazine Model).

RSS to E-mail

A number of services have popularized the idea of offering RSS direct to email. This allows any one with an email address to subscribe. The idea is to have filtering service that aggregates thousands of RSS feeds and lets users opt-in to receive digest that auto-builds from the feeds they’ve selected. In a lot of ways services like Newsvine, Digg and Mixx can be tweaked to do this, I’m thinking more inbox than web though. This process can all be automated on the user’s end (think Feedburner’s “Subscribe by Email” option).

RSS to TV

Second to mobile phone penetration is Television. For those with digital TV, another way to reach them is to allow the user to select news feeds on a specific channel that only displays text. There are a few DsTV and Digital Cable services currently experimenting with this model, but as digital TV becomes more and more the norm, I think an all text channel would be increasingly useful.

RSS to Radio

Newscasters already aggregate news from a number of sources then broadcast edited versions out over the air for their listeners. What I’m talking about here is something more like NPR where the sources aren’t necessarily news sources, but bloggers, researchers, professors etc. The idea is to share more obscure (but useful) content that the local news papers can’t (or won’t) cover. Again, broadcasters would use creative commons content, cite sources and there would be an editor to filter out the most relevant information.

How could it be monetized? Most radio stations monetize their audience through advertising but in the example of NPR, it’s largely community funded which seems to work well.

About the Author: Jonathan Gosier (Founder) is an American-born software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he is working on two fronts: to encourage western businesses and investors to engage African entrepreneurs and to encourage the adoption of computers, programming and use of the internet in the developing regions of Africa. He is a huge advocate for promoting the ways in which a semantic web will benefit emerging economies in the world.

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