At Health-e News, we tell stories at the intersection of health and social justice. Our mission is to hold authorities accountable and make sure the realities of underserved communities in South Africa are seen and heard. We’re a small team, just four editorial staff and a network of freelance community journalists, but our reach goes deep. Our journalists don’t just report from communities; they are part of them. They don’t parachute in for a story and leave. They know what it means when a clinic runs out of antiretrovirals, when an ambulance takes six hours to arrive, when there’s no running water at a hospital.
Rethinking Community Journalism
For years, OurHealth, our community journalism programme, has been at the heart of what we do. It’s what allows us to cover stories that would otherwise never be told. But we had hit a plateau. Over time, some of our community journalists (CJs) moved on to full-time jobs or other opportunities. Since they’re paid per story, pitching became inconsistent. And with the news editor stretched across so many demands, there just wasn’t enough time to focus on strengthening the programme. We could see the cracks but didn’t know how to fix them.
The accelerator didn’t change our mission. It reminded us why the work we do matters. It gave us clarity, strategy, a renewed sense of purpose, and the tools to do it better.
Accelerator project focus
By the time we joined the IPI Local News Accelerator, we felt stuck. We knew our stories mattered, but we weren’t reaching our target audience of underserved communities in the way we needed to. We weren’t engaging them as well as we could. And we hadn’t stepped back to ask a fundamental question: What does this audience segment really need from us?
The accelerator gave us the space to figure that out. We realised that the challenge wasn’t just about scaling OurHealth. It was about making sure we were telling the right stories in the right ways. We started thinking differently about what community journalism could look like and how we could make it stronger.
Our approach to the accelerator was to first learn, process, develop tools and systems, and then apply. We haven’t got to the implementation stage yet, but we’re almost there!
The first step is to bring structure back to OurHealth. We created a user needs survey for CJs, and have set up a schedule for monthly training workshops, not just in health reporting, but in multimedia storytelling, data journalism, and tackling misinformation. We want to create an environment where they feel supported, where they have the skills and confidence to pitch consistently.
Going back to the user-needs model
Community engagement had always been a priority, but we weren’t doing it in a way that was sustainable. It was ad-hoc and inconsistent. The accelerator helped us step back and see that engagement doesn’t have to be a huge, resource-heavy effort. We developed a practical, structured way to do information needs assessments in the communities we serve.
One of the biggest shifts was learning to say no. We used to spend time debating whether a story fit our mission. That was time wasted. We developed a simple rubric so that both our staff reporters and community journalists know exactly what to pitch and why. It’s a work in progress, but it’s already making our editorial focus much sharper.
We had already been exploring the user-needs model, but it hadn’t quite landed. We started firmly encouraging it—we want it to be intuitive. The rubric makes it easier for reporters to think about how a single story could take different forms to reach different audiences. Instead of just publishing an article, we now look at how that story could also be a Q&A or a community diary entry.
One of the biggest shifts was learning to say no. We used to spend time debating whether a story fit our mission. That was time wasted.
What’s next for Health-e News
The accelerator pushed us to move beyond the way we’d always done things. We’ve been experimenting with WhatsApp and video, but we’re now looking at how to create more content that is low-data, highly engaging, and accessible to the people who need it most.
Scaling OurHealth won’t happen overnight. It will take time, training, and money. Finding sustainable funding is still a challenge, but shifting our editorial approach to focus on audience needs has made us more intentional about where we put our energy. We believe it will also make our work more valuable to donors.
We recently secured funding from Tekano, an Atlantic Institute-backed health equity organisation, to train a new cohort of community journalists to focus on the social determinants of health.
The accelerator didn’t change our mission. It reminded us why the work we do matters. It gave us clarity, strategy, a renewed sense of purpose, and the tools to do it better.
Health-e News was one of the participants in IPI’s Local News Accelerator 2024, part of the Media Innovation Europe (MIE) project, co-funded by the European Union. The MIE programme is led by the International Press Institute, implemented in collaboration with Thomson Media, the Fix Foundation and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).
