Those challenges, and strategies to meet them, are the topic of a new report by the renowned American think-tank, the Brookings Institution. In the report, Darrell West, founding director of the organization’s Center for Technology Innovation, analyzes why some 4.3 billion people on the planet are still locked out of the digital revolution. onMedia put a few questions to West about what the divide is as wide as it is and what might be done about increasing connectivity in the developing world.

​Is there one primary factor behind the divide? Or is it a combination of issues?

One of the largest barriers to internet access in the developing world is the high cost of devices and internet services. For many people, smartphones and tablets remain far beyond their financial means. And even if they can pay for a device, they cannot afford the telecommunications and data usage charges that are required to access the internet. Some governments also are worsening the cost situation by imposing new taxes on mobile devices or telecommunications fees. That makes it even more difficult to solve the affordability crisis in internet usage.

Darrell West

The biggest problem of the digital divide is all the people who are not reaping the benefits of the digital revolution. Increasingly, people are applying for jobs, getting educated, and accessing health information online. Those without internet connections are not able to do these things and this puts them at a disadvantage compared to others who are connected. That widens inequality and access to new digital tools.

You say it is especially important to make progress on digital access in the cases of India and China. Why?

Half of the world’s unconnected (2.2 of the 4.3 billion) live in China or India. This means that in order to solve the digital access problem, we have to pay particular attention to those countries. Each has a large number of people outside the technology revolution. Internet service providers and website operators need to provide content in the local languages common in those places and undertake steps that encourage a diverse and uncensored internet. In conjunction with addressing cost barriers, these steps will bring more people into the digital world and provide economic opportunities for those who go online.

​Data charges are often cited as contributing to the digital divide. You’ve said zero-rating programs are effective ways to expand access. Can you explain?

Zero-rating programs help those who are poor in the developing world get access to services and information that otherwise would be too expensive. Telecommunications firms waive data caps for a range of basic services and this encourages greater internet usage. In combination with free wi-fi services, this can open up a range of websites and encourage them to become more active online.

You point to a diversification of content as key to bringing more people into the internet fold. What kind of content would be more appealing to those who are not online now?

People want to use the basic content that other people are accessing. They want to be able to apply online for jobs, check the weather, use social media and find necessary information. If they are in remote rural areas, internet access helps them broaden the marketplace and buy products outside their local village. Anything that broadens their horizons and gives them access to more diverse content is useful from their standpoint.

Problems of digital literacy and a fear of the internet, especially among older people, are cited as stumbling blocks. How can these problems be tackled?

Many elderly people in the developing world don’t know how to use computers or worry about the security of their online activities. They hear stories about hackers and think they may be victimized. We need educational programs that reach these individuals and give them the digital skills necessary to encourage safe, online participation. Older people want to use the internet to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren so that provides a means to get them to learn how to go online for basic information and services.

Darrell M. West is vice president and director of Governance Studies at Brookings and the founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation. He is also the editor-in-chief of the technology policy blog TechTank. His current research focuses on educational technology, health information technology, and mobile technology. He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including including Going Mobile: How Wireless Technology is Reshaping Our Lives, Digital Schools: How Technology Can Transform Education, and The Next Wave: Using Digital Technology to Further Social and Political Innovation. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Interview conducted by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

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By June 17 this year, many African countries are supposed to have completed so-called “digital migration.” This is the process of switching from the analog network traditionally used to broadcast TV to a digital network, and then turning the analog network off.

The benefits of digital TV signals are many. Up to ten digital channels can be carried on the bandwidth that it takes to carry just one analog channel, potentially offering much more choice in programming. The TV picture quality itself if brighter and sharper; sound quality is better. And the freeing up of the spectrum allows the possibility of using frequencies for broadband internet or other wireless services.

The switchover deadline for Africa was set back in 2006 by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency. But even with that nine-year lead time, most African countries are nowhere near ready.

“The migration is a daunting task for any country,” Meredith Beal, technology adviser for the African Media Initiative, the continent’s largest umbrella group of media owners and operators, told onMedia. On the side of TV operators and governments, he said, there are costs related to new infrastructure, digital transmission equipment, the disposal of old analog equipment, training and consumer education – among other issues.

But in some countries, Beal thinks broadcasters have acted in bad faith.

“In my opinion, it is a combination of greed, arrogance, lack of vision and a sense of entitlement on the part of the big boys, which reminds me of how the record industry resisted the progress of online distribution of music,” he said.

Upgrading TV sets

For consumers to watch TV on the new digital system, they will need to either buy a set-top converter box, buy a new digital TV, or subscribe to a pay-TV service with a cable or satellite provider.

“That may be challenging for many citizens,” Beal said.

Tom Jackson, a journalist who writes on African business and technology and co-founded Disrupt Africa, a news portal about Africa’s tech startup and investment scene, also hasn’t minced words on the issue. He’s written that Africa is “woefully unprepared” for the switchover from analog to digital signals and that the word “chaos” might best describe the current situation.

“African countries had nine years to prepare, sensitize their people, and make a smooth switchover,” he told onMedia. “However, there was no urgency, [and] many African countries only really got going in 2010 and 2011.”

According to Jackson, education campaigns to inform people about the digital migration have been inadequate and there haven’t been many efforts on the part of governments to subsidize them for poor households.

“Then,” he added, “the process in a number of places ended up in fights, many of which led to court.”

Blank screens

The biggest dust-up over digital migration has been Kenya. For 19 days, many citizens in the country, one of the largest TV markets in Africa, were staring at blank screens after four of Kenya’s main free-to-air TV stations turned off their signal due to a row with the government over the switchover.

Kenya’s KTN is one of the stations involved in the row with the government

The ITU has exempted 30 African countries from having to switch to digital in June. Those countries include northern Africa nations such as Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt as well as several in or near the Horn of Africa – Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan. But according to Jackson, these exemptions were agreed upon back in 2006, and those countries that signed up to the June 2015 deadline will have to abide by it.

That’s led to something of a panic as a few countries have rushed through the migration process before they’re ready.

Tanzania turned off its analog broadcasting last year, even though only about 500,000 of the necessary digital signal decoders were in use in a country of some three million TV sets. In Rwanda, more than a quarter of people with televisions hadn’t gotten a decoder when the nation switched off its analog broadcasts on July 31, 2014.

“Now people are denied access to often their only source of information,” Jackson said.

Even South Africa, one of the continents most developed countries, has fallen behind in its preparations – its expected not to meet the deadline although there are contradictory accounts of when the switchover might happen.

The reason the deadline matters is because after June 17, the ITU will no longer protect analog signals from interference. So if one country stays analog but broadcasters in neighboring countries begins transmitting using a digital signal, it could make the analog signal unwatchable. This is of particular concern in border areas.

Digital dividend, delayed

Another issue is that when a country’s broadcasters delay switching from analog to digital, they continue to occupy valuable bandwidth that could otherwise be used to roll out broadband internet, badly needed in Africa. This potential for better internet as a result of digital TV migration is known as the ‘digital dividend.’

It’s estimated that 95 percent of African households have analog TV systems

Tom Jackson believes it’s a “lose-lose” situation for Africa. “The main issue is in what doesn’t happen, i.e. no better TV, no digital dividend,” he said.

But while Africa is lagging, it’s certainly not the only place the digital migration is hitting hurdles.

“Countries in Asia and Latin America have had similar challenges of financing infrastructure and equipment, training, and educating law-makers and regulators of the implications of the technology,” said Meredith Beal from the African Media Initiative.

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Photo: flickr/Moreno Berti, CC BY-ND 2.0

Whether journalists can be activists isn’t a new question, but it’s one that’s still being heatedly discussed– especially as digital technologies increasingly make it easy for anyone to create and publish media content. Some say journalism and activism are mutually exclusive because activism, by its very nature, compromises the journalism ethics of balance and neutrality.

Others argue activism is compatible with journalism as long as people are open about their agendas. One of these is Dan Gillmor, a columnist for the Guardian and a university professor who regularly teaches and writes about digital media. He is also the author of several books including Mediactive and We the Media (pdf), which popularized the concept of citizen journalism.

Ahead of a visit to Germany where he is speaking at DW’s Global Media Forum, Dan Gillmor spoke to onMedia about how he defines journalism, uncovering journalism in unexpected places and why he doesn’t trust Facebook.

Dan, is it still relevant today to ask “what is a journalist”?

I think the most important question is “what is journalism” as opposed to “who is a journalist”. A decade or more ago when we started seeing the rise of citizen journalists, it seemed clear we defined a journalist as someone who was getting paid to report. And I thought it was important to define what journalism was and to recognize an ecosystem that was, and still is, getting more diverse and more valuable.

What is journalism then?

It is both difficult and wonderful that we can include many things in the definition. We have to think of journalism as a process rather than an outcome; in the case of journalism, the outcome is information that is useful or entertaining or both. And I felt when we looked at the process instead, it made a much better definition. So I came up with a series of principles. If most of these principles were part of what I was seeing, then I was going to call it journalism.

What are these criteria?

The principles included being thorough, accurate, fair, independent – and here I mean independent thought, not independence of one’s employer and biases but rather looking for things that would challenge the basic assumptions – and transparency. Traditional journalists would probably agree with the first four principles. But because of the principle of transparency, I felt organizations like Human Rights Watch or the American Civil Liberties Union were doing something very close to journalism. After all, most organizations these days have a website and publish their reports, so they are creating media. That is a very exciting development because the ecosystem is getting more diverse.

You have said there is now journalism in places where we never would have discovered it. Can you me give an example?

I certainly wouldn’t have recognized a report from Human Rights Watch as journalism ten years ago – it was only when I realized what they were doing was following these principles that it occurred to me. The only principle I wasn’t sure about was that of ‘independence’ because Human Rights Watch have a certain agenda. But I don’t think their process twists things to meet this agenda. And even if it did, we credit some of the most twisted tabloids as journalism. Human Rights Watch is certainly more independent than tabloids such as Daily Mail and some agenda-driven television and radio (read here about how Human Rights Watch sees its place between journalism and advocacy).

You mean to say, if a political party writes articles transparently, they are producing journalism?

If you leave out the principles of ‘fair’ or ‘independent’, then it is not journalism by any standard. And I can’t image a political party being fair or independent. I would like all five principles to be present but many journalists are not thorough, so it’s a messy definition.

Some say Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who broke the Snowden story of the NSA surveillance, is not a reporter, rather he is a liberties activist. What do you think?

I think that is partially mistaken. Greenwald is an advocate and a journalist. And there is a long and proud history of advocacy journalism in the United States, starting with the people we called the muckrakers over a century ago, who were very much trying to change society.

Here in Germany, journalists have criticized Greenwald because he has openly spoken of himself as being part of the activist community.

I guess I would ask your colleagues if they consider themselves part of the German community or part of the journalism community. We are all part of communities of various kinds and does that disqualify us from talking about what effects our communities and backgrounds have on us? No one would suggest we shouldn’t write about our country because we are citizens and therefore biased. Transparency solves a lot of these issues. Glenn is certainly independent in his thinking. He has shown himself able to attack people who have been his allies when they disappoint him. I admire him – I don’t agree with everything he writes – but I don’t know many people who do more homework or more digging.

Shouldn’t what Greenwald writes be considered as commentary rather than journalism?

Again, the lines between commentary and journalism are not always clear. The best traditional journalism gives a nuanced neutral presentation of the issues. But that is not always so clear-cut. From who we interview to the documents we look at and what we leave out, those are often agenda-driven decisions even if we don’t realize it. Our worldview is built into everything we do. What some people worry about is letting a worldview totally dominate and never giving time to people who don’t agree. The answer is, if you are a journalism organization and you want to be the only newspaper that someone looks at, you might decide you have an obligation to be as neutral as possible. I would argue in a world where it is increasingly possible to get information from a variety of sources, it is really the job of the audience to take for granted that there are many views and go looking for alternatives and confirmation. That feels to me than like a better answer.

If I was reading one newspaper every day about my community and that was the only source information I could get – which used to be the case – then I would hope the paper is trying to be independent and fair and thorough and accurate. But the more I would get to know the news, I would realize the owner has an agenda and the editor has an agenda. As such, the kind of neutral journalism that people talk about has never fully existed at all. It is a unicorn. And now that audiences have choices, I hope we can let the unicorn fade away.

At the recent International Journalism Festival in Perugia, you were part of a panel talking about the the Snowden effect. Have whistleblowers like Snowden and organizations like WikiLeaks changed the media landscape?

Sure. WikiLeaks is a journalistic entity. Much of what they do is important, and they are part of this ecosystem, and this is really key to me in thinking about information and media. So I am glad that they are around. Jillian York from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said during the panel, and I agree, that every news organization should have a WikiLeaks-like system to get things from leakers. There is software called SecureDrop, which lets anonymous contributors get documents to news organizations. WikiLeaks showed how things might be done. I don’t 100 percent support everything that they have done but I support them in the journalistic ecosystem very happily.

What does the journalism ecosystem of the future look like?

Journalism is part of a larger media ecosystem. We can see fairly clearly that the tools, the tactics and the techniques of journalism are changing rapidly. But there are some baseline assumptions: anyone with a computer (including those small computers we call mobile phones) using minimal tools can create media, and digital networks are pervasive. This second assumption means that this ecosystem is going to be incredibly diverse, ranging from giant state-supported or corporate media to the individual who witnesses an event, captures it and sends it to, for example, witness.org and helps get the word out. In the case of the people capturing the video, they are not journalists, but they are doing journalistic work.

There are a lot of digital tools such as Facebook or Google out there. Are you worried they will take over what we consume?

What Facebook has accomplished is remarkable from a technical and sociological point of view, and of course as a business. I hardly every use it though because I don’t trust them. They have fairly clear goals: to persuade people to do everything in ways that create data that can be sold or used, and to make Facebook an alternative internet. In some cases, where the data used to surf Facebook is free, Facebook is all people know. Facebook is the internet. Google’s dominance in advertising and their dominance in sheer power of their computing systems and what they know about people is stunning. You can avoid organizations such as Google and Facebook but most people don’t chose to. The search engine I use is DuckDuckGo because they don’t log my data.

Why is that important to you?

I value my privacy and there are principles to uphold. Privacy is essential for all of us. And I would rather pay for things than become the product, which is what these other search engines do. If you are not paying for something on the internet, then you are the product being sold on the internet. I prefer to pay.

How can you convince people to change their online behavior?

When someone says, you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, that is a grotesque lie. In fact, we all have something that can be used against us. There are so many laws that no matter who you are, and what you have done, you have probably violated some law. The increasing moves to store everything we have said and done means people can go back and find something where you have technically broken that law. I don’t expect that to happen but that is how police states start. The other important thing to realize is that pervasive surveillance is harmful in larger ways. It makes people less willing to speak freely, less innovative, less willing to take the kinds of risks we need for dynamic societies. And it is contrary to any common-sense understanding of liberty. People who are being watched all the time are not free in any sense of the word. We have a lot to fear from 21st century Stasi states.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Interview by Steffen Leidel, edited by Kate Hairsine

Dan Gillmor is a professor of digital media literacy at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. As well as regularly writing for the Guardian, he is the author of several books, including Mediactive. You can follow Dan on Twitter @dangillmor

ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images

A mobile revolution is exploding throughout Africa, giving a new generation of Africans access to mobile phones and mobile internet. This creates significant challenges, as well as opportunities, for media companies in Africa who need to find innovative ways to attract new readers and new revenue streams. onMedia’s Steffen Leidel talks with Justin Arenstein from the African Media Initiative about how mobiles are changing Africa’s media landscape.

What does the media landscape in Africa look like at the moment?

In Africa, you actually have two very different continents. You have the coastal continent which is connected to the outside world through undersea cables, so you get fairly good mobile and internet connectivity. Then you have a hinterland where there is no electricity and no connectivity at all. This means radio is still very dominant. Print is also still healthy and growing because only about 10 to 15 percent of the population have ever been print consumers. With Africa’s growing affluence, people have now starting to have disposable income. It’s a very small amount and on a very small basis but suddenly consumers can expand their lifestyles as well as their knowledge aspirations. Then they become new media consumers. The reality is that the media understand they are going to face the same disruptions and shift in audiences currently seen in America and Europe. But the disruption is not going to be internet driven, it’s going to be mobile driven.

Why mobile driven?

In a continent of a billion people, there are 800 million sim cards. Obviously, there aren’t this many cell phones because people have multiple sim cards, but there is a growing uptake of mobile. Handset costs are also coming down. So the media are working very aggressively to prepare themselves for this kind of shift. And unlike in Europe and in the US, the industry itself is working in a coordinated fashion. They have realized that you need to have the backbone infrastructure, that you need to have a widespread uptake of such platforms. If you think of the industrial revolution, which was powered by railways, we are building digital railways across the African continent because in large parts of it they don’t exist.

How is media innovation in Africa different to innovation in Europe or the US?

One small difference in that with innovation in the global North, you are fighting against inertia – you are fighting against an audience already using technology that more or less works. As a result, it is much harder to get people to change. In Africa, people literally go from radio to an Android tablet and that is their first engagement ever with the internet. In the same way, their first engagement with banking is mobile banking – they have never been to a bank building and stood in a queue. This means there are many more early adopters. If you have a good product, people are more likely to use it. In Europe, you’re fighting a lot of clutter.

More than eight in ten Africans have a mobile phone, and demand for mobile internet access is booming

Who will be the media players of the future?

Classical media will always be a part of the landscape but we are also seeing the emergence of mobile carriers. They originally partnered with media organizations to drive traffic and to share content on a co-branded service with a shared revenue model. Then they recognized that journalism isn’t rocket science and that journalists are incredibly poorly paid. So now they’re building their own newsrooms in places like Uganda and are becoming direct competitors.

Are there concerns about a decline in ethics if corporate organizations become news organizations?

One of the dangers it that lot of these new players don’t have a long history of journalism as a craft. Because of the fleeting nature of a lot of these new media organizations, they don’t develop an institutional culture. Now that is said with a caveat, because a lot of African media companies lack this deep media tradition as well.

Are there sustainable business models for media players trying out innovative products?

It is estimated that 85 percent of the Kenyan population now use the mobile payment system M-PESA in one form or another (“pesa” means “money” in Swahili). And M-PESA is easy to build into media products and allows for micropayment solutions in order to access certain content. Because people are very attuned to paying on a mobile, there is no resistance to making a micropayment for content they need. The flip side is that people will only pay for what is valuable and unique; they won’t pay for poorly developed content.

There are other kinds of revenue models, too. The Star in Kenya has developed products that run alongside its health reporting. For example, they run a story about fake doctors in Nairobi. If you want to find out if your doctor is fake, you pay a premium sms rate to find out if your doctor is legitimate. It’s a product that contextualizes, personalizes and localizes this big news story. But to do that, to make the story personal, readers have to pay a small premium. In order for media organizations to create revenue they have to massively increase their volume because the payments are only micropayments. That’s driving the media to expand because they currently have very small markets. If you look at the average size of a newspaper in Africa, very large papers are selling only 50,000 to 60,000 copies. So the flip-side is that digital technologies are forcing the media to expand into untapped rural markets.

Corporations such as Google and Facebook says they want to improve connectivity in Africa (read more about Google and Facebook’s plans). And then, in many places around the world, mobile operators allow their customers free access to Facebook but make them pay to surf other parts of the internet. Are people concerned about commercial enterprises controlling the internet on the continent?

I think it is something that you can’t worry about if you don’t have internet access. First get internet into people’s lives and than start talking about whether you want net neutrality or not. We are speaking about communities that don’t have electricity, don’t have schools or access to universities. These are people who otherwise have no way of communicating with someone living 50km down the road. There are no postal services. So access to free Facebook is a revolution. Why? Because they are not paying for the data they use and they can use Facebook messenger to communicate with family or friends or find other kinds of information resources anywhere else in the world. Yes, it is a walled garden in the sense that the user’s access to the internet is restricted. But the first fight is getting them online, then we start fighting about what that means and how to tear down the walls.

What advice do you have for training organizations about how African journalists can keep up with the digital transformation.

Not to treat it as being about the internet or digital content. The approach should be platform agnostic. Otherwise you’re just setting people up for the next disruption or the next change. Rather, you should set them up to deal with an evolving future where content is key and can go on any platform. Technology is not key because there will always be technicians available and newsrooms and news editors who will be able to repackage content as long as we can give them structured data content. The how, why, what, where of a story – they are all data points. And we now need to start breaking down the content so a story can be machine reformatted for a mobile screen, for a long-form story or for an infographic in as cost-effective a way as possible. Again, it’s not easy. Currently only some of the big players, such as the New York Times, can do it. We need to find cost-effective ways of doing this and to develop workflows.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A former journalist, Justin Arenstein is now a Knight International Journalism Fellow working on a digital innovation program at the African Media Initiative – an umbrella organization of African media owners and executives. The idea of the program is to develop strategies and resources to help African media leapfrog the disruption caused by the growing digital penetration of local audiences and media markets. Projects include seeking ways to digitize newsroom archival material, to creating a network of newsroom innovators and creating reusable API technology.

Steffen Leidel talked to Justin Arenstein on the sidelines of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, where Arenstein was part of a panel discussion on the future of African media. You can watch the panel discussion below.

onMedia has previously talked to Justin Arenstein about the hacks and hackers trend in Africa.

At the recent DLD (Digital Life Design) conference in Tel Aviv, media experts from renowned publications such as Wired UK, Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal gave their perspective on the future of the publishing industry.

Here is an overview of some of the key points raised.

Online journalism differs from traditional journalism, but is still very demanding:

James Bromley, former Managing Director of MailOnline.com: “We were very unfashionable about creating online content. You have to be incredibly fast running, predict where stories are. There are no weeks of research as in print. But it’s not less diminishing”.

Ben Rooney, technology editor, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Europe: “Newspapers used to be a good distribution mechanism. People used to buy newspapers in the morning to read the news of yesterday. The Internet could blow these things to pieces”.

Both monthly titles and online publications are built around trust their audiences put in them:

Ben Rooney, WSJ: “It’s the question of trust and responsibility. Newspapers live or die by the scoops they can get. What the Wall Street Journal sells is trust. If news appears in the Wall Street Journal, it moves the market. It’s very humiliating to get a correction”.

Print publications are increasingly selling experience and a sense of belonging to a community:

Madhu Venkataramanan, Wired UK: “Monthly magazines can’t break any news but they build communities of interests. Even online people are trying to build communities. For example, we are talking to a group of people who love technology”.

James Bilefield, advisor for Condé Nast International: “There’s an increasing need to sit back and immerse oneself in the product. Vogue is for example about what matters and the point of view, it’s experience and not news consumption. Sit down, get a glass of wine and enjoy the experience”.

Competition for newspapers is changing:

Ben Rooney, WSJ: “Newspapers now have much more competitors. They have to compete in a way they didn’t have before. It’s not just competition with other newspapers, but also with Facebook, Twitter or Angry Birds”.

James Bilefield recommends to extend the brand across all the different platforms and make sure you are relevant: “You need to be strong in all different channels. Vogue in France is followed on Twitter by more people than Le Monde. Why? Because they publish updates from fashion shows”.

Madhu Venkataramanan from Wired UK doesn’t see social media as competitors but rather as allies: “We want to leverage social media. Recently our executive editor tweeted and asked his audience what the things that we are not covering are. He received lot of feedback. That helps us make stories better”.

Ways of monetizing content: from tablet apps to paywalls and content packages:

James Bilefield, Condé Nast International: “You have to apply editorial expertise to the content. Tablet apps enhanced with video, audio and other extras have future. In the future, tablets will not be the only platform, but it’s much easier to pay on a tablet than online. You can make money from journalism, but you have to change the way you’ve done it in the past. One way is to try news cooperations. It’s proven to be hard to sell single stories for the web. So far the trend is in other direction: bundling content where people will pay for it””

James Bromley, MailOnline: “We are going through a change in the way information is accessed by the readers. The link which will help you disseminate information is much stronger than the platform it’s been built on. Our work is about stolen pieces of time: readers have four or ten minutes while on a train or waiting for someone. So the question is: How can we take time from Facebook time?”

Journalists need to use the brand of their organization to build up their own personal brands:

Madhu Venkataramanan, Wired UK: “Both brands feed into each other. The personal brand exists now more than it did before. Usually it’s with the help of a famous newspaper or magazine you write for and where you start from.You use the media brand to build up your personal brand”.

Author: Natalia Karbasova

Natalia Karbasova is a regular contributor to onMedia and works at Hubert Burda Media where she conducts research into e-content and e-commerce issues.