After seating with an idea to start a data-driven online news start-up for three years, on January 2018 we decided to launch our first news site www.nukta.co.tz.
The drive behind starting the site and our company Nukta Africa, was to influence maximum use of data in decision making among the youth and businesses in Tanzania through data-driven news stories.
We want to push transparency and accountability to everyone through data.
For long, data produced by the government, NGO’s, UN agencies, research tanks and companies have not been well exploited by the media and the public in general.
Few people understands that data can show them unexploited business opportunities or help them manage well their daily expenses. Even those who knows the true value of data could not get enough data-driven news stories that would help them make rational decisions or understand broadly prevailing phenomena.
By then and until now, most of blogs and news apps in Tanzania are publishing stories about personalities rather than issues in politics, entertainment, fashion and sports. Undoubtedly, the stories are easy to produce and are in high demand among consumers especially the youth that’s why are highly preferred by publishers.
A risky route
Internally, we decided to take an opposite direction by adding value to the news: more data and contexts which should answer the “so what” or “why should we care” questions and provide digital and data literacy to our fellow journalists.
We decided to pick fewer topics which are less covered in Tanzania mainly in business, energy, technology, safari, education and data.
We knew the potential risks for opting on the topics including slow growth of audience.
However, everyone in the team was happy to pursue the challenging route with the belief that most Tanzanians will understand its value in future. This doesn’t mean we won’t cover sports, lifestyle, entertainment and their cousins, no. We will cover them but very differently.
Another force behind starting Nukta Africa was the absence of original reporting among Tanzanian online news sites. Our short study that reviewed 100 active blogs in the East African nation, discovered that nearly 80 percent of stories were copied from each other.
The same pictures and articles would appear in most of these news sites. Other articles were copied from newspapers as they are but with bloggers bylines. No value addition. Bloggers would copy and paste press releases as they are burying interesting stories on it.
The writing and editing was below standards and of course no adherence to media ethics. We wanted to change this by restoring digital media integrity to the audience. We wanted to change the negative perception about copy pasting behaviour in online media in Tanzania.
Nearly a year and half since we started publishing news and offering digital and data journalism trainings, Nukta Africa has grown massively not in monetary terms but content wise.
We have managed to achieve some of our dreams even under tough circumstances thanks to our readers, sources, columnists, volunteers and partners such as Code for Africa, Hivos East Africa and Internews.
Reversing the norm
Within a year we have managed to publish nearly 1,000 articles of which more than three-quarters are data-driven. We have developed all these stories under very tough statistics law without breaching it. We might have done mistakes in writings but, as we all know, we are human beings.
Some of our news stories have been republished or developed by the mainstream media, a situation which was hard to achieve before. Initially, blogs were seen as copiers of newspapers.
We have covered the technology ecosystem in Tanzania and introduced many young entrepreneurs to the mainstream media and the public in general. We are happy that their brands growing.
Supporting the innovation ecosystem growth
Apart from publishing news, we have hosted dozen of data and technology events including the recent one held this March during the Innovation Week 2019 in Dar es Salaam dubbed “Media for Innovation Growth.”
The idea behind investing heavily on covering the innovation ecosystem is to spur more innovative ideas among Tanzanians and exploit ongoing technologies in all sort of life. We will do more of this in future.
As we grow we don’t want to lock our skills to ourselves. On September last year we started to offer Data Journalism and Fact Checking training services to journalists, public relations professionals and other media houses.
So far we have trained nearly 200 journalism students and practicing journalists in collaboration with our partners including Code for Africa, Internews and Hivos East Africa. Of the trained practicing journalists, five won awards on Excellence in Journalism Awards 2018 by Media Council of Tanzania(MCT) including two on Data Journalism. We are happy to see winners of prestigious Data Journalism categories in the awards, Joyce Shebe (TV) and Yohani Gwangway (Radio) have been trained and mentored by our team.
In a typical capitalist world, it is not a norm to train your competitor to exploit your competitive advantage but we decided to do that to build an ecosystem of well-trained digital and data journalists. In fact, Nukta Africa is among the few companies in the world that trains competitors juts to live our slogan “Let’s grow together”.
Data visualisation for good
To ensure we add more value to businesses, this May we introduced Data Visualisations services to companies. The new service will provide infographics designing service to organisations to reap more benefits from data-driven content under their marketing and communication endeavours.
Unlike others, the infographics are affordable and customisable according to the client’s needs as we put stories first over graphics.
In news production we have started publishing Dar es Salaam stock Exchange market data every evening as well as commodities data from Ministry of Industry and Trade thrice a week.
The data-driven stories are always published on our website and social media and we happy that the government has relaxed the statistics law, opening more interests to other fellow journalists to invest in Data Journalism.
We believe that official data we publish will guide investors, farmers and the general public in making their daily business and life decisions.