Tanzanian media is online but not yet popular

Since yesterday, we have covered several topics, as you will also see from the blogs of the participants. You can now find the links in the column on the right.

We went briefly through the history of internet, from an American military project in late 1960’s to a networking tool of American universities, and even more importantly, the launching of the World Wide Web in Switzerland in 1991 by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

We discussed the business concerns of especially print media, when the younger generations spend more time in the internet and also search for their news there instead of reading the print newspapers. If the circulations fall, it means decreasing income from advertisements. Everywhere one obvious solution has
been to focus more on the online edition by adding quality. In Britain, the famous newspaper Telegraph put its eggs in two baskets. The newspaper decided to invest heavily in the journalistic content online but also into online retail business, trading kitchenware, fashion and garden furniture, which nowadays brings in 30 percent of the company’s income. (In the picture, a garden chair for sale on the Telegraph shopping site. The price is 180 UK pounds, about 450,000 shillings!)

This morning we visited practically all Tanzanian online media. The whole mainstream media is today online, but the discussion with the editors revealed that very few of them use to visit other Tanzanian media online. They stick to the traditional way, reading the print copies and watching the TV. One of the editors even suggested that the online media is mostly targeted for Tanzanians living abroad.

No wonder that the local media doesn’t appear very high in the statistics of the most visited websites in Tanzania. BBC and CNN are among the Top 20, and the most popular media local media website is, maybe a bit surprisingly, Global Publishers, the media house selling sensational tabloid papers such as Uwazi, Amani and Ijumaa. They are in position 28, followed by the popular blog of photojournalist Issa Michuzi. Far behind come the online editions of The Citizen (70th), Daily News (80th) and IPP Media (90th).

These positions might improve in coming years, but probably not much if the network does’t become faster to make reading easier and if the media practitioners don’t develop their online content more, in order to attract readers.

For comparison, the discussion site Jamii Forums was the tenth most popular website on the list.