Why Our Journalism Is WhatsApp Driven

The Citizen Bulletin serves low income communities who rely primarily on WhatsApp to access news. Graphic by The Citizen Bulletin

BY DIVINE DUBE, Editorial Director | @Village_scribe | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | APR 15, 2021

In Zimbabwe, WhatsApp is the internet but over-reliance on the platform might pose serious threats to hyperlocal journalism. We need new, locally sustainable ways of content distribution and audience engagement.

BULAWAYO (The Citizen Bulletin) — When the coronavirus pandemic began last year, we were in the process of revamping our news organization. The pandemic, which is still in our midst, accelerated the process.

We wanted to reinvigorate The Citizen Bulletin into a regional nonprofit news outfit built on a foundation of listening. Our plan was to deviate from the usual breaking news and daily reporting model, a low-hanging fruit for most local digital native newsrooms.

In July 2020, as part of our rebuilding exercise, we launched a magazine-style bi-weekly newsletter that has become our flagship product. Although we knew we were one of the best local news outlets producing quality, hyperlocal reporting and analysis, we had a challenge most newsrooms are battling with even now.

We didn’t have a loyal audience. Most of the thousands of our followers were casual readers. We used a push model for distribution and shovelled our content everywhere, from WhatsApp to Facebook and Twitter. After close to five years of publishing, we were disillusioned to learn that we didn’t have a loyal audience around our journalism.

In September 2020, we began slowly building a WhatsApp broadcast list for our superfans and other audience members with an interest of consistently receiving and engaging with our news products. In our local news ecosystem, most news outlets use WhatsApp groups to distribute their content. But, we opted for WhatsApp broadcasting instead of groups to distribute our news products for two reasons.

First, we had realized that most local groups are polarized and members end up deviating from the agenda to focus on other issues, often sensitive topics that lead to poor group participation prompting some members to exit the group. Secondly, we realized that it’s difficult to build deep, personal relationships with our loyal followers through mass communication within groups.

We have been using WhatsApp broadcasting as our major strategy for distributing our news products and engaging with our followers since 2020. This has worked well, and although our growth has been slow, we believe that it’s better to have one hundred loyal supporters than having a million casual followers who are not affiliated to us. Unlike loyal followers, casual readers do not offer any meaningful support to a news organization apart from reading content.

In January 2021, The Citizen Bulletin was admitted into the Membership in News Fund alongside fifteen other prolific newsrooms across the world. The project is managed by the Media Development Investment Fund via the Membership Puzzle Project. The Fund provides financial and venture support to help news organizations build strong and flexible relationships with their audience members that can drive greater sustainability and impact—and help expand the journalism field’s understanding of what works and what doesn’t .

Since January, our team has been hard at work growing our followership base, engaging our most loyal audience members and building prolific partnerships with community organizations in areas where we have consistent coverage. Our goal is to launch a membership program in a few months to come. What is more exciting for us is not just that our membership program will take a novel form but that we will be the first newsroom in Zimbabwe, and the second in Southern Africa to launch such a program. In the coming weeks, we will write more explainers about what membership in news entails, and what form ours will take.

Three months into our membership journey, we have already learnt a dozen lessons but what we have been battling to understand is how we can manipulate WhatsApp to fit into our audience development plan. Although WhatsApp in many parts of the world, Zimbabwe included, has become a holy grail for journalism, it doesn’t always fit into every newsroom’s strategy since it’s not designed for the business of news. For newsrooms like us who are seeking to use the platform beyond just news distribution, we know first-hand how difficult it could be to use the platform for managing content and relationships with readers.

On April 7, we were banned by the platform for using WhatsApp broadcasting to distribute content to our 600+ subscribers. According to the platform, The Citizen Bulletin violated WhatsApp Business user terms. However, we are appealing the ban, with the hope that while we may not necessarily be able to use the broadcasting facility in future, at least we might be able to use our WhatsApp account line for other purposes, including chatting with our followers, a majority who rely on the platform to access our products.

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According to the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe, a majority of internet users in the country use WhatsApp. That’s the reason why most local news outlets are turning to WhatsApp for news distribution. The Citizen Bulletin serves low income communities who rely primarily on WhatsApp to access news. That’s the reason why we may be stuck with the platform for some time even though we may not be able to manipulate it to meet our newsroom goals.

Although we had initially avoided group chatter, we are considering setting up closed WhatsApp groups for content distribution as we gradually wean ourselves from WhatsApp broadcasting because of the platform’s new user terms that limit mass distribution of content. WhatsApp groups may not be welcome to many of our subscribers who prefer direct messaging, and as such we may face stumbling blocks to our audience development efforts going forward. Our plan is to be open to our followers and engage them so that we co-create solutions to address the limitations we have with WhatsApp broadcasting.

In Zimbabwe WhatsApp is the internet. That is why for hyperlocal news organizations like ours, the limitations of the platform could impede efforts to best serve our audience members, especially those that rely on it to access and engage with our news products. Going forward, we plan to consider locally sustainable ways of news distribution. This is a Herculean task that requires all those who care about local news and our fledgling democracy to collaborate for a sustainable journalism future that doesn’t rely on big platforms such as WhatsApp.