Eight South African independent news creators have joined Google’s Emerging News Voices Growth Lab, a programme helping digital-first publishers.
The newsroom is no longer necessarily a newsroom. We know this, here at TechNation News. Our newsroom is one journalist, her cat, and her AI companion. (Hi, Kayde).
For a growing number of news creators, a “newsroom” could be a YouTube channel or a newsletter or a podcast. Heck, it could even be an Instagram account.
This change in scenery is forcing journalism to reckon with a question the traditional media industry has been wrestling with for years: how exactly do you build a sustainable news business when the audience is no longer coming to you? (As in, buying your newspapers or magazines.)
Google believes some of the answers can be found by giving independent news creators better tools and training, and most importantly, access to expertise.
GNI Emerging News Voices Growth Lab
The Google News Initiative (GNI) has selected eight South African independent news organisations and creators to join the Sub-Saharan Africa cohort of its Emerging News Voices Growth Lab, a three-month virtual programme bringing together 18 emerging news organisations from across the region.
Participants will work with Google mentors and product experts on everything from AI-assisted research and verification to video, newsletters, audience development and revenue.
Independent creators can be exceptionally good at finding audiences without having the infrastructure of a traditional newsroom behind them. The problem is that an audience does not automatically become a sustainable business.
And the platforms those audiences live on can change the rules at any time.
What the growth lab wil focus on
For independent publishers, building a direct relationship with readers is therefore becoming just as important as chasing reach.
The Growth Lab will focus on four areas:
- using AI tools (Gemini, NotebookLM, Google Trends, and such);
- developing YouTube, Shorts and long-form video strategies;
- strengthening open-web and newsletter audiences; and
- finding sustainable revenue models.
In other words, the programme is looking beyond the question of “How do we get more people to see our content?” and moves right onto what comes after that.
The South African participants
The South African participants span very different approaches to digital journalism and news creation.
They include:
- Mapepeza News Media, represented by Stephen Seakgwe;
- SMWX, represented by Oratile Kekana;
- Good Things Guy, represented by Brent Lindeque and Tyler Leigh Vivier;
Explain, represented by Sinawo Bukani; - Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa, represented by Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa
- Our City News, represented by Sibusiso Ngalwa;
- Scrolla Africa, represented by Anita Dangazele;
- The Bigger Picture, represented by Linda van Tilburg.
Independent media can be a lonely business. (Trust us, we know!)
Creators are often competing for attention while simultaneously trying to figure out editorial strategy, technology, distribution, audience development and the increasingly complicated business of making money from journalism.
And of course there is no shortage of advice online about how to “grow your audience”.
There is considerably less help available for figuring out how to build an actual media company around that audience.
AI is part of the pitch….
….but it isn’t the whole story.
AI naturally features heavily in the programme.
Participants will explore Google’s tools for research, transcription, translation and verification, with the aim of finding practical uses for AI in everyday newsroom workflows.
Whenever the conversation turns to AI in journalism, people mostly focus on using AI to produce faster content, while the actual question is whether smaller news organisations can use technology to do work that previously required significantly more people, time or money.
That could mean translating reporting into additional languages or making research more efficient. It could be producing video or identifying what audiences are actually searching for.
Used properly, those tools could lower some of the barriers to running a small newsroom.
They could also make it easier for independent publishers to spend more time on the thing that actually differentiates them: their journalism.
That is particularly relevant in a South African media environment where publishers are serving audiences across multiple languages and communities, while also competing with global platforms for attention.
MDDA partnership
Google is addressing that challenge through another initiative in the country.
In partnership with the Media Development and Diversity Agency (MDDA) and Daily Maverick, the company has launched a nationwide roadshow across five provinces aimed at helping vernacular-language publishers develop digital skills, improve business sustainability and adopt AI.
This was discussed at a previous stakeholders meeting of the Digital News Transformation Fund DNTF).
The training is being offered in isiXhosa, Afrikaans, isiZulu, English and Sepedi, with participants getting hands-on experience with tools including Gemini and NotebookLM.
The bigger shift in African media
The Emerging News Voices Growth Lab is built on findings from the Global News Gap Project, a mapping initiative conducted with Project Oasis and Code for Africa that looked at independent African news creators and where they need support.
A journalist with a camera, a laptop and an audience can now potentially build a publication without a television station, printing press or large newsroom. That democratises who gets to publish news.
It also creates a new set of problems.
- Who owns the audience?
- How does the creator make money?
- What happens when an algorithm changes?
- How do you maintain editorial standards while publishing at platform speed?
- And how do you turn a personal brand into something that can survive beyond the person who built it?
Those are not exclusively South African questions. But with eight South African participants joining a broader African cohort, the Growth Lab is effectively putting some of the country’s independent media voices in the same room to work through them.
And that could prove more important than another course on how to use an AI chatbot.
