With the start of the new year the South Africa Media Innovation Program (SAMIP) added a set of five new organizations to its cohort of participants. These entrants were selected during the last meeting of our Advisory Committee who deliberated over the shortlisted candidates in December 2019.

The five organizations are mixture of start-ups and small businesses from around the country and we look forward to working with them in accelerating innovation and transformation in South Africa’s news media industry. They include:

Media Hack Collective

Media Hack Collective (MHC) is a data journalism and digital storytelling start-up that aims to make data understandable for a wider audience. It was founded by journalists Laura Grant and her husband Alastair Otter.

MHC was one of the organizations that participated in the Journalism and Media Lab (JamLab) in 2019.

QuoteThisWoman+

QuoteThisWoman+ (QW+) is a non-profit that is committed to getting more women’s voices heard in South African media across a wide range of subjects. The organization was founded by communications strategist Kathy Margobi who is also a graduate of the 2019 JamLab accelerator.

QW+ maintains and promotes a curated database of experts that can be accessed by interested parties whilst also lobbying for women’s voices to be heard in important stories in the country.

Scrolla

Scrolla is a news start-up that wants to redefine the mobile-first user experience. Scrolla publishes investigations in a series of short updates that are posted on a daily basis. Scrolla was founded in late 2017 by former Mail & Guardian journalist Mungo Soggot. The publication is edited by former YFM head of news Zukile Majova; chief reporter is Everson Luhanga who has written for Daily Sun; and Stuff Magazine editor-in-chief Toby Shapshak.

Food for Mzansi

Food for Mzansi is an agriculture-focued online news platform that produces stories about people of colour in farming communities. In their own words, they “unashamedly share success stories and good news from the farms and agri-businesses who feed South Africa”.

The company has already won the Best Digital News Start-up category at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Me-dia Africa awards in 2019 – it was founded by award-winning journalist and author Ivor Price and former journalist and digital strategist Kobus Louwrens.

Stockvel talk

Stokvel Talk is a media company that produces a free community newspaper on the South African stokvel market and at the same time, they run series of stokvel roadshows in urban, peri-urban and rural areas in South Africa.

The company was founded by the editor and publisher Eric Phiri who built up a database of stokvels in townships. The company publishes Stokvel Talk and the recently launched Ekurhuleni Talk which are free community papers with a print run of 5,000 per edition.

Look out throughout for more announcements on SAMIP’s next intake and in the meantime stay tuned to our updates for more stories on our program and its participants.