Agency (APS) specializing arts and culture. I use the Internet to post my articles on our website; I also use Twitter, Facebook and when doing research I use a wide diversity of credible sites and it often happens that I’ll write stories based on interviews having sent the questions via email.”
Senegalese reporter Sophiane Bengeloun relies on her Smartphone. “I can take notes with my phone keypad or I can type using the pen, take audio and a snapshot,” she said. In addition to being her paper’s main Culture and Arts reporter, she also covers the criminal courts beat. Sometimes, she will even do an artist’s sketch in the courtroom since cameras are not allowed.
There are other benefits, she said. “Being connected and online also gives you visibility. For example, I got invited to cover the African Union’s 50th anniversary meeting Ethiopia this past May because someone came across my work online.
For Basile Niane the Web 2.0 world is his newsroom. “I spend nearly 70 to 100 percent of my time on social networks, in particular Facebook and Twitter in searching for information. Staying on top of these new media is essential. I am connected 24 hours a day. I make a lot of videos because I have a YouTube channel that’s followed a lot in Senegal. It has 3,000 subscribers and more than 2.5 million views.”
Niane also has his own blog and also blogs for others, including businesses.
“Like the social networks, the cell phone is my companion,” he continued. “In addition to telephone calls it makes it easier to do my work. I never take my eyes off my phone, I work with it and I am connected to 3G+ to read emails, manage my Facebook and Twitter accounts, look at videos and read the news. With the telephone I feel closest to my work.”
Bengeloune, an admitted tech buff, said she’s definitely not typical of her Senegalese journalism peers, male or female, when it comes to using the new media to this extent in her work. “I only know of two or three using it like I do,” she said. “I know of others, who are not journalists.”
Even fewer female journalists are doing this, she added. “I have one female friend who has a blog dedicated to writing fiction. In terms of journalists, the one person who’s really doing this in Senegal is Basile Niane who works at RTS (the TV station). He’s also an active blogger but he’s a rarity among Senegalese journalists,’’ she said.
A number of African journalists, however, have been slow to warm up to new media for very practical reasons.
“Most of us don’t have expensive phones like the Nokia 1000, iPhone 5; nobody has these other than the really senior journalists,” she said. “We have digital tape recorders but you have to be at your office to access that and if people do have smart phones, most are only the basic models.”
“There’s also the issue of security. You’re often going to do reporting in areas where you might risk losing your phone for one reason or other,” she said. Plus, she added, she believes an even bigger reason is the fact that many journalists have yet to take social media seriously.
“For many people they are viewed more as gadgets than work tools. They don’t see the importance of using social networks. For example, my bosses view Facebook as something for play, for amusement, but there’s a lot of information that can be gotten from Facebook,” she said.
Senegalese journalists aren’t alone, Bengeloune said. “What I saw when I covered the African Union meeting in Ethiopia, something that was attended by journalists from across Africa, was that apart from countries like Kenya and South Africa, nobody was putting their stuff online or using social media,” she said.
Even the African Union isn’t using social media to its advantage, she continued. “It doesn’t have a social media section. It has a Facebook page but it doesn’t know how to communicate with it effectively,” she said. As for Senegal, “mostly what you see in Senegal is cutting and pasting, that is putting online what appears in the print edition when a website really should be an addition to the hard copy publication.”
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