Africa has its first drone journalism team. The possibility of capturing aerial images to illustrate the scale or context of a story, or show a completely different perspective, was the inspiration for launching AfricanSkyCAM.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, are increasingly entering service with media organizations around the world. This is because they’re small and cheap to operate. And they can help to produce shots that manned aircraft, even helicopters, often can not deliver.

A quadcopter, such as the DJI Phantom series fitted with a lightweight GoPro HD camcorder, can be flying in the air for around 1,000 euro.

Kenyan journalist Dickens Onditi Olewe is the founder of AfricanSkyCAM. As the head of the online team at The Star newspaper in Nairobi, he was frustrated seeing journalists send in the same kinds of images of seasonal flooding in Kenya, year in, year out. This spurred him to explore the possibility of using a drone to get better shots, he explains to onMedia.

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By Bettina Ruigies

Today’s fast moving media environment requires a lot of flexibility from media workers. Multimedia skills are a must. Journalists need to be able to produce stories for radio or television, print or online. At the same time, digitization, the Internet and affordable equipment enables anyone who wishes to open a TV station on YouTube or at least run a blog site.

All this technical innovation offers tempting perspectives for hard working and talented journalists. But frustration and failure might set in when it turns out that hardly anybody is watching or reading.

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