YouTube in Africa offers a new kind of news
By
Binu Mathew
Salam madior fall has been a pioneer more than once. In 1999, while studying in America, he and a friend founded Seneweb, one of the first websites devoted to news from Senegal, his home. By 2002 Seneweb was the most visited news site in Francophone Africa. In the late 2000s, media firms there still focused on satellite television. Mr Fall thought that setting up “a fully-fledged tv channel would be going backwards”. So in 2012 he started putting news videos on YouTube. Today, Seneweb’s headquarters in Dakar has more than 100 employees, plans to expand across West Africa, and has correspondents as far afield as Europe and America.