This article draws from my conversation with Ivana Heijnen in Episode 7 of the Voices and Visions podcast, which explores the people and ideas shaping Africa’s innovation economy.
Across much of Africa, companies are becoming larger, richer, and more influential. The newsrooms expected to scrutinise them are moving in the opposite direction.
I found myself returning to this contradiction during the seventh episode of Voices and Visions, a podcast hosted by Ivana Heijnen about the people shaping Africa’s tech and business ecosystems.
I have always believed that journalism begins with caring about people, systems, and whether they work as they should. A reporter’s responsibility is not merely to describe events. It is to examine who is exploiting whom, which institutions are failing, and who benefits when they do.
“There’s that surveillance role of a journalist,” I told Heijnen. “You scrutinise who is stealing from whom, what is going on well, what is not working as it is supposed to, and give people solutions to some of these things.”
That role is becoming harder to perform.
African newsrooms are operating under severe financial pressure. Advertising revenue has shifted to global tech platforms such as Facebook, Google, and X. Print circulation has declined, while audiences increasingly expect news to be free. Media organisations have responded by imposing hiring freezes, laying off staff, and shrinking editorial budgets.
Reporters are expected to produce more stories across more platforms with fewer resources.
Investigative journalism is particularly vulnerable. It is expensive, slow, and legally risky. A reporter may spend weeks pursuing a story that generates no immediate revenue and may never be published. By contrast, a sponsored event or corporate announcement can generate income and be turned into multiple pieces of multimedia content within hours.
While this is now being presented as a media business problem, it is also a big accountability crisis.
“Media has a huge role,” I said during the conversation. “Surveillance. We need to scrutinise everything that is in the public. We need to hold everyone to account, and that is telling the story as it is.”
But watchdog journalism cannot survive on responsibility alone. It requires reporters, editors, lawyers, travel budgets, data, and institutions willing to withstand commercial and political pressure. As those resources disappear, the people and companies requiring the greatest scrutiny gain more room to shape the stories told about them.
Powerful companies, weaker newsrooms
Large companies have resources that most African publications currently do not. They retain communications advisers, lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations agencies. They cultivate relationships with editors, sponsor industry events, and buy advertising across multiple platforms.
None of those activities is inherently improper. Companies have a legitimate interest in explaining what they do. The problem arises when their capacity to influence the public narrative exceeds the media’s capacity to interrogate it.
Some of the companies journalists cover are also among the biggest sources of advertising revenue. Their executives may have close relationships with media owners. In some countries, the people who possess political or commercial power also directly own the outlets expected to scrutinise them.
“Some of these people who have this power also own the media outlets,” I told Heijnen. “They just want reporters to rejig whatever they want to churn out.”
A financially secure newsroom can resist some of that pressure. A struggling one must calculate what it can afford to lose.
This imbalance matters because large corporations are not passive victims of weak systems. They can possess enormous power to influence regulation. A major bank, telco, or multinational can lobby policymakers, hire influential advisers, and gain access to decision-makers in ways that an ordinary citizen cannot.
“If they want a regulation or a policy to be changed, they can lobby, they can push for it,” I said. “But they choose not to because they also benefit from that flawed system. And who loses in all this? The ordinary person.”
Without independent reporting, the public sees only part of that relationship. Companies speak enthusiastically about innovation, inclusion, and the jobs they create. Far less is said about market dominance, labour practices, political connections, or the regulations they helped shape.
Press releases become the story
The effects are especially visible in Africa’s tech ecosystem. Startup coverage is heavily influenced by fundraising announcements, founder profiles, and carefully constructed claims about impact.
The companies receiving the most attention are often those with the strongest communications machinery, not necessarily the strongest businesses.
“Capital follows narrative,” I told Heijnen.
Before capital becomes rational, it can follow emotion and attention. A compelling founder story attracts coverage. Coverage creates visibility. Visibility suggests momentum. That momentum attracts investors, partnerships, and still more coverage.
Many highly funded startups understand this loop. They retain effective PR firms and build relationships with journalists and editors across the continent. They appear repeatedly in the media, becoming familiar to investors and policymakers.
“Whether their business models are good, or they are solving a problem that is there, is neither here nor there,” I said. “They’ve mastered what can capture attention.”
Journalists are meant to interrupt that loop with difficult questions. How many jobs did the company create? How much revenue does it generate? Are its customers better off? Did the product lower costs? What happened to the millions it raised three years ago? Are its claims independently verifiable?
Yet these questions require time and expertise. It is much easier to rewrite an announcement saying that a startup has raised $5 million than to spend months investigating what happened after its previous round.
“Fundraising should no longer be news,” I said. “A good idea should attract investment. The story should be the impact.”
The amount raised is not meaningless. Funding can reveal where investors see opportunity and which sectors are attracting capital. But money entering a company should mark the beginning of the scrutiny, not the successful conclusion of its story.
If journalism stops at the announcement, the media becomes part of the startup’s fundraising infrastructure.
Funding accountability
The answer is not to pretend journalism can exist without money. Reporters need to be paid. Publications need sustainable revenue. Events, sponsorships, subscriptions, and advertising can all support valuable reporting.
The danger arises when the organisation being scrutinised becomes indispensable to the survival of the organisation conducting the scrutiny.
That dependency can change editorial priorities even without direct interference. Publications begin producing more of the content advertisers want. Reporters spend more time at corporate events and less time with workers, customers, and whistleblowers. Success is measured by output, traffic, and commercial partnerships rather than the public significance of the reporting.
Meanwhile, communities harmed by corporate decisions usually lack professional communications teams. A customer challenging a bank, a worker dismissed by a company, or a small business squeezed by a dominant platform cannot organise a press briefing whenever they want to influence coverage.
Journalism is supposed to correct that imbalance. It gives people without institutional power a way to confront those who possess it.
But that requires media institutions strong enough to absorb the consequences.
In my conversation with Heijnen, I acknowledged that newsrooms are undergoing a profound transformation and that older business models are no longer as profitable as they once were. Those constraints affect what stories can be pursued. Still, financial difficulty cannot erase the reason journalism exists.
“We need to think of it in the long term,” I said. “How do we keep up with storytelling and holding people to account?”
There is no simple answer. African media will need more readers willing to pay for journalism, more diversified revenue models, and stronger legal and institutional protection for reporters. Newsrooms must also draw a clearer line between commercial partnerships and editorial decisions.
Journalists, for their part, must resist becoming distribution channels for corporate narratives. We must interrogate fundraising claims, question impact figures, and return to companies after the headlines have faded.
The survival of African journalism is not only about saving reporters’ jobs or preserving familiar media brands. It is about maintaining one of the few institutions capable of confronting absolute political and corporate power.
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