Originally from Brazzaville, SENE OSSEBI returned to Congo two years ago. Upon settling on the continent, he came up with the idea of launching Sport News Africa, a media outlet dedicated to African sports news for Africans on the continent as well as the diaspora.
You launched the Sport News Africa platform a little over a year ago. What were your ambitions? How would you assess it today?
Sport News Africa is a pan-African online media outlet created with the ambition of bringing together all African sports news across a multitude of disciplines in one place. After conducting a benchmark study, I quickly realized that there were a multitude of sports news sites, but they were only dedicated to one or two disciplines, namely soccer or basketball.
We launched the website in 2019, but the latest version was released in March 2021. So we've been around for a year and a half now. Today, if we had to take stock of our activities, the results would be very positive! Our goal was 5,000 visits per day by the end of 2021. However, we've already achieved that goal. We have nearly 150,000 visits per month, and our social media community has 180,000 followers on Facebook and 20,000 on Instagram. We are just getting started on Twitter.
We are adopting a different strategy for each social media platform in order to reach and meet the expectations of a wider community.
How is the editorial team organized? What types of content do you produce?
Today, SNA's management is based in Brazzaville, but when we launched, I was quickly referred to a former editor-in-chief of BBC Africa, Courani Diarra, based in Dakar. … So, by necessity, we developed our editorial team in Senegal, with four editors on site and a network of 20 correspondents across the continent.
We produce content that is relevant to our target audience. Eighty percent of our articles are about soccer, but we also cover basketball, athletics, swimming, cricket, and Senegalese wrestling. Today, profiles are also developing in board sports in Senegal and Ghana, so we are starting to cover disciplines such as surfing in these countries, as well as skateboarding, which is booming: Accra is set to welcome its very first skatepark soon. We also collaborate with the AFD and its pan-African program Sport en commun. Based in Dakar, this program is designed as an incubator and aims to promote the financing and support of projects combining sport and development in Africa.
To support this initiative, we are launching a magazine that will cover all topics related to results, rankings, and international and local sports competitions, with a focus on initiatives to develop the African sports ecosystem.
Is there a place for women's sports?
I am a woman myself, and so is the editor-in-chief, so women's sports definitely have a place. We wanted to highlight women's sports through news about African female athletes from the diaspora and of African descent. Whenever we cover a men's topic, we think about how we can approach it from a female perspective to show our support for all those female athletes who still suffer from a lack of visibility compared to their male counterparts.
When it comes to sports news coverage in French-speaking Africa, what challenges do you face today?
In terms of news and sports coverage, the health situation is a real challenge! Monitoring is also an issue in our daily work. We are supposed to produce 100% of our content, but like many others, we are constantly faced with problems of plagiarism.
When it comes to sports, and particularly soccer, journalists often lack impartiality in their coverage of sports news. Do you face this problem?
It's something I'm particularly aware of today, as we are in the process of establishing partnerships with national federations. When we receive information from these federations that concerns several clubs, and the correspondent who handles the information and sends us their article, we can sense a certain lack of impartiality in the text. From a journalistic point of view, this is not what readers expect. We therefore have a duty to remain vigilant and to verify the information before publication. This problem is even more acute in the case of local competitions that are not covered by the more mainstream media.
Do you have a specific editorial strategy for digital media?
From the very beginning of our activity, we have focused on the quality of content, but also on the user experience of our website. Today, we realize that we also need to develop content for digital media. We can't just rely on editorial content. To this end, we are producing more and more videos with flagship features. We are also working on the "tone" by collaborating with comedians and influencers such as Observateur Ebène. We also produce a lot of content with athletes who follow us on social media. We are currently working on all kinds of "live" content on Instagram and Facebook, not to mention new platforms such as Twitch. Little by little, we are integrating digital codes into our news coverage.
Can you tell us about your recently published study on the most influential athletes? Are there any other studies in the pipeline?
We wanted to produce studies because we wanted to become a reference on the continent in terms of sports. So we started with a ranking to show the impact of major athletes on people's daily lives. We chose Twitter as the reference platform for this first ranking, identifying the impact of athletes on the community, their impact at the local level, the social actions carried out by these players, and how they are perceived by internet users. We published this groundbreaking study on "The 100 most influential African athletes on Twitter," conducted in collaboration with Smart Data Power, which uses the official Twitter API to collect, enrich, and analyze this data.
What are your prospects for development?
We recently released the English version of Sport News Africa, which we hope to develop through a network of correspondents deployed across English-speaking Africa to provide a pan-African perspective on sports news and ultimately benefit from a genuine network across the continent.