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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.

HTML is the language used to build webpages and makes it possible to display information on the internet. These days most content management systems (CMS) allow us to create stories on blogs and websites without having to get our hands dirty with HTML. But even with a good CMS, what you see is not always what you get, so understanding some basic HTML is vital for journalists who are serious about improving their digital skills.

In most cases your participants have probably seen HTML at some point in their web surfing: whether by an accidental mouse click that revealed the source of a webpage, or in the options to share and embed media such as YouTube videos or SoundCloud audio tracks.

To the untrained eye, trying to read HTML is like trying to read another language.

So the challenge for a journalism trainer is to introduce HTML in a way that doesn’t overwhelm your participants, but gives them enough knowledge to identify useful HTML terms, tags and elements so they can do some basic editing to their blog post or web article.

Pardon my French

Before we go any further, let me make a confession. My knowledge of HTML is about as good as my schoolboy French. In other words, I know enough HTML for day to day online work. For most journalists, just having some basic HTML knowledge is more than sufficient to adjust and customize text and media in webpages or troubleshoot some formatting in a blog post.

The beauty of Mozilla Thimble is it’s an easy to use editing platform for writing HTML and creating a webpage. Thimble lets you write and edit HTML and CSS in your browser, then instantly preview your work.

As you see in the screenshot below, you can write your HMTL text in the left hand side of the editor and see the preview results on the right hand side.

For many participants this is often a little “Aha!” moment and begins to demystify a technical language that is usually hidden to them.

Practical work

Before using Thimble in workshops, I suggest you prepare a few things to make sure training runs smoothly. For example:

– Checking that all workshop computers are running an up to date version of Mozilla Firefox, and/or all participants have the Firefox  browser on their laptop or netbook.
– Open a common Mozilla Webmaker account if you are planning to do a lot of HTML exercises. This saves time because everyone can log in with the same account rather than opening individual accounts during training. You can, of course, use Thimble without having to log in, but you won’t be able to publish.
– Ask your participants to have a couple of extra tabs open in their browser with either a webpage or something with a media file embed code that you can copy and paste such as YouTube.

Once all participants have opened Mozilla Webmaker and found their way to Thimble within Tools, I keep it simple and ask everyone to press Start from Scratch which opens both the Thimble Editor and the Preview page opposite. And this is when it starts to get interesting for your trainees.

Start from Scratch opens with the example of a simple webpage with a line of text saying: “Make something amazing with the web”.

You can immediately point out the basic skeleton of a webpage in the Editor such as the Head, Title and Body. Make sure everyone has the Show hints box activated. By highlighting the text of individual tags with your mouse and clicking on the ? icon, Thimble’s Show hints function provides a definition and explanation of the selected element. That’s a really useful function for participants.

I also ask everyone to try changing the words within the Paragraph tags, or to copy and paste this line and to add more text. It’s very easy for them to see that text will be displayed between pairs of angle-bracketed Paragraph tags <p> and </p> and that this technique is applied to display different types of media as well.

Other useful HMTL tags to know are:

<br> Line break (essential!)
<b>Bold text</b>
<i>Italic text</i>

For more, check out this quick reference list of HMTL.

Perhaps the most common use of HTML for your participants will be embedding the HTML text of an image, video or audio into a website or blog. If participants have another browser tab open with something easy they can embed, for instance from YouTube, ask them to copy and paste the embed text into the editor.

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/lz4ZdL5jZb4″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

It’s very easy to see what the video frame’s width and height attributes are, and when participants paste it into the editor they can experiment with adjusting the frame size.

Seeing the big HMTL picture

Once they get the idea of identifying and adjusting these basic tags and attributes of media, you could even ask participants to copy and paste the HTML text of a full webpage into the editor – just so they can see what it looks like and how they can make some edits.

I find our own onMedia Blog is a simple example to use in training.

When everyone has the webpage open, I ask them to do a right mouse click and select View Page Source from the dropdown menu. Firefox will then open a new page revealing the HTML and CSS of the selected webpage. Ask your participants to select all, then copy and paste this text into the Thimble editor.

In Thimble your participants will now see both the HMTL and a preview of the copied webpage. I suggest they experiment (play!). For example, try changing the text within the blog’s Title Text ( in this case located on Line 135):

The great thing is they can directly see changes they make to the HTML text in the Preview. And by having a point of reference of something important in a webpage such as the Title, your trainees will be able to start looking around for other elements they can adjust, be it articles or captions or menus.

Mozilla Thimble is free to use and there are loads of resources on the Webmaker site for teaching web literacy skills.

Author: Guy Degen

In order to boost innovation and encourage new strategies about news presentation, the Global Editors Network (GEN) and Russian news agency RIA Novosti held a Hackday on Dec. 10-11 in Moscow. Called “Hack the Newsroom,” the event brought together three-person teams made up of an editor or journalist, a developer and a designer from national and regional Russian media organizations.

It was one of a series of such hackdays held at some of the globe’s leading newsrooms this year. The aim is to help newsrooms develop new approaches to producing and presenting editorial content and think creatively about apps, interactivity, data visualization and newsgaming projects.

“There are a lot of innovations in newsrooms, but they don’t often come from the editorial side,” said Antoine Laurent, GEN’s deputy director. “To deliver innovative content on a regular basis, you need to have a direct connection between the technical and editorial sides. Innovation comes from collaboration.”

The winning project

This time, it was all about big data and data journalism. Participants had to turn open data into compelling stories. As a result, participants came up with projects mostly based on national data.

You can watch the presentation of the final pitches here (in Russian). The winning project was developed by the team from the Moscow-based magazine “Bolshoi Gorod” (“Big City”). They presented an interactive map of Moscow showing where city residents spend their free time based on based on 126,000 of check-ins by users of VK, a popular Russian social networking site.

In this interview, Laurent told onMedia why he thinks data journalism is here to stay, why GEN is holding a series of hackdays and how journalists will need to manage digital content in the future.

What’s special about this particular series of hackdays?

Normally, hackdays are coding marathons. But this is not what we asked teams to do this time. We wanted to make it more collaborative. It’s about having ideas, testing them out, coding and developing a prototype. It’s also more about getting people to work in a new way, although the outcome is important too.

A normal hackathon is open to everybody. Teams can be formed during the event and the task would be defined. We were opposed to that since while this kind of format can spur new ideas and generate new networks, afterwards everybody goes back to where they come from. For us, it was very important to invite teams made up of members of one media organization.

Why is that?

We’re not just focusing on data journalism but rather on building multidisciplinary teams. In addition, we expect some kind of investment from the media. It doesn’t have to be big and the direct return on the investment isn’t clear. We just ask the media to work with what they have, which means journalists, developers and designers. And participants did make an investment since they sent people for two full days. In the end, it’s about bringing about internal organizational change.

Why do you need to change the internal organization of a newsroom?

When a data team is integrated into a newsroom, it works better in terms of content quality and frequency. We see a lot of media organizations working with external data agencies, but I think it’s better to have people inside the newsroom because they can produce regularly. You avoid one-shot projects, like when you do a big data visualization project and then forget about data journalism again for another six months. You can even have a small internal agency inside a newsroom, maybe just one data journalist. This could have a good effect on the newsroom because staff will be talking about it.

Do you consider data journalism a trend that will be around for a while?

Conducting investigations with large amounts of data is a trend that is going to stay and actually, it’s quite old. Computer-assisted reporting has been around for a long time. Data-driven journalism is about user interaction, apps, games and visualizations. For example, what you see at The New York Times is that people doing data journalism pieces are integrated into the interactive news team. So I think data journalism is a very important trend, I’m just not so sure about the name.

So it’s more about the content than about a data-driven approach?

If journalists start to work with developers, they’ll be able to produce any kind of digital content. The whole point is for journalists to learn how to work with programmers and become a kind of project manager. This is one of the biggest needs in newsrooms. It’s about changing the way you look at the content. Many people tend to get obsessed and want to turn journalists into developers, but I think the most important point is that journalists learn how to manage a digital product. The content is a digital product, so you need a product manager. Either a journalist becomes a product manager or you put one in charge of your team. It’s then that you turn to developers and designers.

About the Global Editors Network:

The Global Editors Network (GEN) is a nonprofit, non-governmental association committed to the principles of innovation and information sharing in the newsroom. Among other things, the organization offers Data Journalism Awards to honor the outstanding work of data-driven newsrooms worldwide. GEN’s program called The Editors’ Lab is a global series of Hackdays hosted by some of the leading newsrooms in the world. This year, Hackdays were held at The Guardian in London, Le Parisien in Paris, Yahoo in the US and RIA Novosti in Moscow. The last two national Hackdays of this year will be held at VRT (Flemish Radio and Television) in Brussels in December and at El Pais in Madrid in January. After that, the national Hackday winners will meet for a final international Hackathon to be held in Barcelona in June during GEN’s News Summit 2014.

Three years since it was founded, Storyful has attracted some major clients, including ABC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times, and generated hundreds of articles about its innovative take on news gathering – though the company has yet to break even. DW Akademie’s Kate Hairsine talks to Mark Little about why he started up a social media news agency in the first place, his belief in journalism and why he thinks journalists can make great entrepreneurs.

Where did the idea for Storyful come from?

I was a foreign correspondent for the Irish national TV station, RTE. In about 2009, I realized the job being done by professional journalists was increasingly being done by ordinary people, by people with camera phones which enabled them to share pictures and essentially create journalism. I realized that this was the opportunity to join forces with these newly empowered citizens and tell stories about the world. But the problem is as soon as everyone can tell a story, who do you listen to? A hundred hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube every single minute. How do you find the video that actually shapes the great stories of our time? I realized that the only way to do that was to bring professional journalists back in to manage this overabundance of information. They would be the ones that would add context and shape the stories around these incredible images coming from places like Syria. So I thought, “let’s break the old news agency model, let’s start again from scratch” and that’s where Storyful came from.

Weren’t you concerned about leaving your safe job with a national broadcaster to become an entrepreneur?

Some people said to me later they thought I was leaving because I had had a nervous breakdown. I was leaving a well-paid job as the anchorman for the evening news program and it was a nice cushy lifestyle that I easily could have gotten used to. But I imagined my child 20 years later asking me, “what did you do Dad when you had that great idea?” and answering “nothing” – that would have been worse than falling flat on my face trying. I realized I wanted to be able to answer, “I tried”. On the other hand, it was also survival. I wanted to create a sustainable business model for the journalism that inspired me when I was a kid. And if I don’t do it, who else is going to do it? I think we all have a personal responsibility right now not to moan about the problems facing journalism. Instead, let’s do something and create something.

What skills did you bring with you that helped in founding a news agency?

Storyful was conceived so it wasn’t just about news; it is about stories and storytelling. Being Irish, I think we have a particular tradition of storytelling, it is something in my DNA. I had also been a foreign correspondent and I had been self sufficient. I had essentially been an entrepreneur in the field because I had set up the first Washington bureau for my station and I had been on my own in very tough situations. Getting up in front of a group of investors is far less scary when you have been shot at in Afghanistan. These experiences gave me the confidence to just do it. They also gave me a sense of vision. I had spent 20 years believing in journalism and that is a pretty infectious thing.

Where there times that you stood up in front of a group of investors and thought, “oh dear, I wish I knew more about business”?

I can’t count the amount of times that I have sat in rooms full of people who have MBAs and I just shut up because I didn’t know what they were talking about and that is still the case today. But I think one of the great things about being an entrepreneur and a journalist is that they are very complementary. They are both about leadership and about vision. Once you have those skills, you can learn everything else. You can’t learn vision and leadership. They are things that are built into journalism and that is what  makes journalists potentially great entrepreneurs.

Foreign correspondents aren’t renowned for their teamwork though – aren’t they too individualistic to inspire a team?

As a foreign correspondent, you are incredibly driven and egoistical to a certain extent. But at the same time, you have to have certain skills of persuasion to get your team to get in the jeep to follow you to the frontline or get on the plane with you where there is a risk of dying. So I have never felt there’s a contradiction between the two because that is also what business is about – it is about egotistical people with missions who manage to bring people with them.

It’s normal now to see YouTube videos and Twitter photos being used by serious news organizations but this is quite a recent phenomenon. How difficult was it three years ago to find investors for your idea of a social media news agency?

When I was leaving my previous job someone said, “you just said the word tweet on air” as if I had said an expletive. I remember thinking there was an underdeveloped notion of what was going on. It was of course much more difficult to try to raise half a million euro in Ireland in 2009 and 2010 when the country was going off the cliff. But at the same time, investors aren’t looking to imitate what is going on: they are looking for the next new thing. From that point of view, it wasn’t that difficult to persuade people who are by nature disruptive to invest in an idea where there was no market, there was no product, there were no landmarks and no precedent. There was nothing. There was just the sense of vision.

How are you making money?

We have built up a subscription model so we have news organizations around the world who pay us a monthly fee to discover and verify the most valuable content on the social web. This can be big news events but also trends that are catching fire on social media. In the past year, we have also developed a content licensing model. When we find a particularly compelling video that we think has the capacity to attract millions of views, we work in partnership with the uploader to make as much money as possible. We do that by revenue share on platforms such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN. We also do it by selling content though our partners and getting as many views as possible. And finally YouTube themselves have helped us build a business through managing the most compelling videos on their platform.

“Take your time in hiring the right people,” Little says

What kind of mistakes did you make when you first started?

One of the key mistakes you will make is picking the wrong people who don’t necessarily share your vision. People who don’t share your vision should not be on the journey with you and that is something that you don’t realize sometimes until it is too late. I think the other thing I realized was to be true to yourself. I would take decisions because I felt someone with more experience of business was advising me to do it even it didn’t feel right in my gut. All of the mistakes I have made are the things that didn’t feel true to me.

You say it’s important to employ people who share your vision. What kind of people are working for you?

We have 30 people working for us in Dublin, Atlanta (in New York State) and in Hong Kong. The vast majority are journalists. We have some old broadcasters like myself but we tend to find those who are the most adept when they come into Storyful are younger sub-editors who have worked in production, the kind of people who have worked catching mistakes for news organizations or newspapers. They are social media natives, who pay attention to detail and can tell you where the punctuation should go but are also good storytellers. They are the new breed of journalists who are going to thrive –  people who are not afraid of change, who are slightly pedantic, who are innovative but also ambitious and aggressive.

What are you personally getting out of Storyful?

To be honest, the biggest sense of achievement I have right now is not building Storyful but is building the team that built Storyful and inspiring people. I was 41 when I started Storyful. It wasn’t like I was a 15 year old in the basement inventing this technology. I have a wife, I have kids. I mortgaged my house and we lived on nothing. I didn’t get paid for a while and I had been very well paid. I think essentially asking them to come on the journey with me was really difficult. Other people have made sacrifices because they believed in what I told them and at times, they have suffered as well. So on a personal level, now we are three years in, I want to reward the people who believed in me. In addition, I am very proud to be part of a movement that I think will emerge, not from Silicon Valley or New York, but probably from Nairobi or Singapore. And if one person in Kenya or Burma or Brazil sees the example of Storyful and goes and founds a company, that is a better tribute than anything I could have got as a journalist.

Interview: Kate Hairsine

Newsgames need not be expensive and complicated to develop. In this post, Marcus Bösch, DW Akademie trainer and director of the Serious Game Studios the Good Evil, explains what you need to produce a small game based on a straightforward example.

“Newsgames are sometimes not much more difficult to produce, than interactive graphics,” says Sisi Wei, who works for the American non-profit news desk ProPublica. Check out her comprehensive blog post about Creating Games for Journalism.

And it’s true. A couple of months ago I developed with my game studio, the Good Evil, a small fully functioning game on the topic of Prism within just four days. It’s all about a playable political commentary, one of many possible sub-genres of newsgames.

Is this journalism?

In the past few weeks we have modified and adapted a puzzle game we programmed for Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. The result was GI Jumble, a sort of modern sliding puzzle that allows you to rearrange the photos selected by the Global Ideas team. Though let’s press the pause button for a moment before I go into more details. Of course, one might ask: What on earth does this have to do with journalism?

A legitimate question. The puzzle takes content that already exists, in this case the photos of reporters who traveled around the world, and displays them in a new context. The game is interactive and allows users to explore the content. By rearranging the images yourself, the experience with the photograph is much more intense than by pure observation. This can serve as an ice breaker or point of introduction and lead to more thorough examination of the Global Ideas content. Apart from that it’s also fun to play with a puzzle on a computer or tablet PC . And who says journalism should not also be entertaining and fun?

So how does it work?

What do you need to produce a game like GI Jumble? You generally need a game designer who comes up with the game idea; a graphic designer, who comes up with the design of the puzzle; and then of course you still need a programmer who implements the whole thing, making sure that it technically works.

With GI Jumble we were able to fall back on a game CC play that we had already implemented for the German Archives with the support of the German Wikimedia Foundation. The mechanics of the puzzle already existed. And thanks to HTML5, it was possible to play the game both on traditional PCs and Tablet PCs with touch interface. We have published the entire code for CC play under an MIT license, free to use for Github – of course we appreciate modifications.

Flickr and the API

To transform CC Play into GI Jumble, our programmer Guido had to play around with the code a bit. Primarily we had to include the pictures of the Global Ideas photographers into the game.

We decided to use a programming interface (API) that Flickr offers. The significance of so-called API’s can not be overestimated in the age of digital journalism. Here on Read Write you can find an introductory text about this topic.

Simply put, Flickr hosts the images and with every game GI Jumble (dynamically) grabs them, mixes them, adds a caption once they are assembled and makes the end result available. The categories in the game (people, water, nature, wind, solar, biomass) are the tags of the photos used in the Flickr album.

This means: if you now add additional images to the Flickr album and tag them, GI Jumble does not have to be reprogrammed. It just grabs the new images. A sustainable solution.

In cooperation with the graphics department of the Deutsche Welle we then adjusted the puzzle visually. The inserted image gives an overview of what you have to pay attention to. The usual separate handling of content and form on the web guarantees that the puzzle can also be modified afterwards, without meddling with the mechanics of the game.

Soon, in every newsroom

GI Jumble is just a small example of a game, which can be significantly more complicated. As games enable an interactive experience and can therefore often better explain things than traditional linear media, I’m pretty sure we will see more of this in the future .

For inspiration and ideas I recommend the following list. And who knows, maybe  British newsgame designer Tomas Rawlings is right with the prediction he made recently at a conference, that in the future every newsroom will also include a game designer.

Rock Your Newsroom

This young media genre is currently developing worldwide. Brazil already has  a growing newsgame community and the trend has also spilled to Africa. It’s a newsgame that won the first sub-Saharan African Newsroom Hackathon in mid-September 2013. The prototype was finished after 48 hours. None of the three team members Loni, Fiona and Carla had ever attended a hackathon before, and they had also  never previously worked on a news app before: “The fact did we could pull together a working prototype in less than two days will rock our newsroom.”

Since 2001 Marcus Bösch has worked as a freelance editor, author and trainer for Deutsche Welle. After completing a masters degree in Game Development and Research, he founded in 2012 the game studio the Good Evil GmbH. Together with his colleague Linda Kruse, Bösch designs serious games and newsgames for cultural institutions, NGOs and media houses.