How can AI turbocharge the delivery of high-quality news in Africa?
IPI’s Local News & Innovation Network hosted a virtual newsroom visit to Scrolla, the independent South Africa-based newsroom, on October 17, 14:00 CEST.
Scrolla is an African media platform combining high-integrity popular news with innovative low-data mobile tech, serving the continent’s vast, underserved middle class. Since its founding in 2019, Scrolla has been a bilingual publisher in Zulu and English. In 2021, Scrolla won a Google News Innovation award for its Data Lite site, which uses less than a 10th of the data of normal sites, expanding its audience and reach. In 2024, Scrolla reached over 1.3 million monthly unique readers in its launch market of South Africa. The organization has been rapidly expanding its use of AI tools to leverage its small news team and maximize distribution and revenue.
Topics covered in the visit:
- The launch of Scrolla, its mission, primary objectives, and business model;
- Scrolla’s experience with low-data mobile tech;
- The use of AI in small newsrooms and its transformative potential for the media in Africa.
At the newsroom visit, we heard from:
- Mungo Soggot, CEO
- Everson Luhanga, Editor at Large
- Sbongile Nonyana, Reporter and Translator
- Dylan Bettencourt, News Editor
Watch the recording of the event:
Watch the Recording
What are the Virtual Newsroom Visits?
Virtual Newsroom Visits – a series of virtual live events, open to the wider public and promoted in our IPI members network, as well as the IPI’s Local News and Innovation Network. In the series, we invite experienced, innovative independent media organizations to share the BTS of their media business. These first-hand stories serve as a resource and inspiration for other journalism organizations striving to make a positive impact in their communities.
The broader goal is to level up the floor of the industry’s understanding and knowledge and create opportunities for exchange, helping our peers to do the best journalism for our communities. We now open the 4th season of IPI’s newsroom visits, organized as part of IPI’s Local News & Innovation Network, which hosts our Slack community for peer-to-peer discussion.
>> Explore the previous Newsroom visits
IPI’s virtual newsroom visits are made possible by support from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom (FNF).
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