Research on digital journalism often assumes that online-native newsrooms expand discursive diversity and challenge legacy media’s dominance. Yet, growing evidence suggests that digital platforms may reproduce rather than transform established framing norms. Contributing to this debate, this study examines how news organizations with different institutional profiles frame political crises, assessing whether digital-native outlets meaningfully diverge from legacy-affiliated journalism. Focusing on coverage of Kenya’s 2024 anti-Finance Bill protests, the analysis compares Citizen Digital, a legacy-affiliated outlet, and Kenyans.co.ke, a digital-native platform. Using qualitative content analysis of 100 news articles from each platform, this study identifies three dominant frames—law-and-order, victimization, and political critique—with the law-and-order frame appearing most frequently (Citizen Digital, 32.6%; Kenyans.co.ke, 30.0%). Despite their organizational differences, both outlets exhibited similar framing patterns, challenging assumptions that digital-native platforms inherently diversify political discourse and instead raising questions about the macro-level conditions shaping editorial practices across media fields. The findings suggest that shared structural constraints within the media environment may sustain framing norms typically associated with legacy journalism.

ABSTRACT Although sports journalism has historically been a male-dominated field, there is a growing presence of women in the industry worldwide, including in Africa. Despite this trend, Tanzanian sports journalism continues to exhibit a significant gender imbalance. This study explores the perspectives of female sports journalists on reporting sports news, identifies the obstacles they face, and examines editors' contributions to enhancing female participation in newsrooms. Guided by Linda Steiner's media feminism theory, we employed a qualitative approach, conducting in-depth interviews with 20 female sports journalists and 10 editors from 10 media outlets, including print, radio, and television, in Dar es Salaam. The results indicate that although editors are actively working to promote gender equality, societal perceptions continue to undermine women’s credibility in sports journalism. Additionally, sportswomen expressed challenges such as a lack of acceptance, insufficient support and cooperation from male counterparts in the sports industry, sexual harassment, and a deficit of self-confidence among female sports journalists themselves.

ABSTRACT This article traces the career of journalist Siphiwe Mpye, as a public intellectual and the editor of two South African men’s magazines. Mpye edited BL!NK in 2004, a publication started with funding from the National Empowerment Fund and intended to provide progressive reading material for a post-apartheid generation of black men. It was a publication intended to entertain but also uplift through cultures of literacy focused on representing modes of masculine citizenship. In 2020 Mpye returned to the men’s press with the online publication notedman.com, this time a literary response to an even more “woke” articulation of masculine subjectivities. His interest in “positive masculinity” is contrasted with a career marked by forthright, albeit hopeful, realism. Through a content analysis of Mpye’s career, writing and the two publications he edited, one gains some understanding of how black empowerment is narrated in the men’s press, a stable notorious for its neoliberal politics and bourgie interest in luxury but used by Mpye to cultivate Left-leaning but inclusive digital literacies. The emphasis is less on Black Economic Empowerment as a governmental initiative and more on black empowerment as something achieved spontaneously but also deliberately from “below”. How do men in media addressing a cis-hetero audience, define, enact and problematise “empowerment”, if at all? Telling this story is important because it demonstrates the awakening conscience of a nation briefly lulled into patient complacency by a narcotic faith in democracy and its long-term bedfellow, capitalism. Whether this faith was misplaced is not the point; rather, the discursive analysis of specifically the digital platform notedman.com in this article is designed to show how middle-class masculinities can negotiate political awakening, even online, with honesty and a sense of responsibility.

ABSTRACT Our study on the experiences of selected African journalism educators during the Covid-19 pandemic period offer valuable insights into the future of journalism education in Africa, where convergent learning holds prospects in an increasingly digitised world. A convergent teaching and learning approach, combining face-to-face and online teaching, is crucial for the delivery of quality journalism training during periods of macro shocks in Africa. This qualitative study used three country case studies of Zimbabwe, South Africa and Eswatini to understand the reconfigurations accompanying convergence in teaching and learning and offering prospects for the future. Our findings show that the most affected learning aspects were courses involving practical learning as well as the internship component that requires students to be seconded to media houses of choice to develop a practical feel for the newsroom. We learnt that journalism’s practical components make it hard for instructors to conduct convergent learning because of resource constraints and limited literacy in some technology. However, and far from the discourse of scarcity and impoverishment, educators displayed high levels of creativity, adaptability and agency beyond the structuring influence of deprivation, presenting prospects for convergence in teaching and learning in post-Covid Africa.

ABSTRACT In the era of the COVID-19 pandemic, the spread of misinformation has become a significant challenge, undermining public health efforts and causing confusion among the general population. Amidst this infodemic, knowledge brokers have emerged as crucial figures in combating the proliferation of false and misleading information. These individuals serve as vital intermediaries, bridging the gap between the scientific community and the broader society, ensuring that accurate and reliable information reaches the public. The paper explored 72 knowledge brokers’ experiences and challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine science communication through the qualitative descriptive exploratory method, in Malawi. The findings revealed ineffective government engagement with communities, which side-lined knowledge brokers, enabled vaccine doubts; religious and political figures’ worldviews shaped COVID-19 narratives; and digital illiteracy overwhelmed brokers. These deficiencies left brokers vulnerable to myths about the pandemic and vaccines, which they propagated. Key challenges arose for knowledge brokers trying to navigate conflicting information needs. For instance, political interference and digital noise obstructed brokers from analysing issues fairly to serve their communities. Still, knowledge brokers became vital as local fact-checkers. Their unique position bridging online/offline spheres was core to brokers’ positionality, blending interpersonal credibility with virtual content interpretation. This paper proposes guidelines for community-rooted communication intermediaries to strengthen crisis resilience by diagnosing systemic constraints, mitigation strategies, and ethical imperatives. It reveals potential amidst pitfalls for contextual knowledge brokers promoting sound interpretations of science. Ultimately, substantive broker training and mentoring are essential to optimize roles while avoiding the spread of inadvertent misinformation.

ABSTRACT This study explores both the coloniality of knowledge and politics of representation and the dominant political ideologies manifested within the Ethiopian Brodcasting Corporation (EBC). It also deepens media coverage of protests by interrogating how the media in Ethiopia construct knowledge and negotiate politics of representation in every aspect of the political scene. The study employed an exploratory case study research design through the lens of decolonial epistemic theory to scrutinise the mass media coverage of protests deployed in the EBC. This study mainly discusses the colonial matrix of power, dominant discourses and their ideologies in EBC regarding protest representation against Addis Ababa’s Integrated Master Plan (AAIMP). The study extends its argument to how decolonisation occurs in the struggle for economic control through the land-grabbing political system of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government of Ethiopia. The study’s central argument regards AAIMP’s goal to annex the neighbouring Oromia regions, proposed in 2014. Through this colonial matrix, as emphasised by the work of Tlostanova and Mignolo, the study elaborates on how the government imposes restrictions on the media representation of protests and how and why the media partially or fully ignore or distort the coverage of social movements.

ABSTRACT Amid a rise of misinformation worldwide, this paper examines digital misinformation literacy as it relates to COVID-19 news in East Africa. The study is grounded in inoculation theory and contributes to the body of scholarship examining misinformation literacy beyond the Western world. Data came from a comparative, cross-national survey in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda (N = 3,203), making this the largest known empirical investigation into digital misinformation literacy in the region within the context of a pandemic. Paper surveys were distributed throughout all three countries in 2021. The data revealed differences in actual and perceived misinformation literacy levels. Kenyans and Rwandans were better at detecting false COVID-19 statements in the media, whereas Ugandans were better at detecting true messages. Similarly, Kenyans’ and Rwandans’ perceived levels of digital misinformation literacy were higher than Ugandans’. Regarding perceived exposure to COVID-19 information, Kenyans felt they were exposed to fake COVID-19 news online more often than Ugandans, who felt more exposed than Rwandans. This research contributes to the growing literature on digital misinformation literacy, an area which isn’t significantly studied in many world regions, especially in Africa.