Late in November, the city Kampala in Uganda erupted in Flames, the authorities had arrested two candidates competing to unseat Uganda’s president of 34 years, and protesters flocked the capital’s narrow streets, burning tires and clotting the sky with dark smoke. The security forces swooped in with tear gas and bullets and dozens of people lost their lives.
Well, it was a big international story that unfolded a short drive from the paper’s office. But editor David Lumu had fewer journalists to dispatch than just a few months before.
During the country’s coronavirus lockdown, The Observer’s revenues dropped and the paper temporarily scampered its print edition and shrunk its staff.
How the Pandemic changed the dynamics of Media Industry
Just as the pandemic has strained governments and businesses worldwide, it has decimated the newspapers that cover them. This is particularly true in Uganda, whose press corps is among East Africa’s most free, according to the Washington-based, pro-democracy group Freedom House.
Peter Mwesige, executive director of the African Centre for Media Excellence, or ACME, which tracks the country’s media industry said, mainly because of plummeting newsstand sales, about half of the country’s roughly 50 print outlets shut down at least temporarily.
Newspapers are the lifeblood of Ugandan media. While radio and TV are more popular, many of their stories essentially recycle newspaper reporting. But even papers that survived the pandemic cut staff, despite a tsunami of news, including the protests of this month’s presidential election and social media disinformation campaigns aimed at both.
The papers’ protest coverage, for example, offered a factual counterweight to a web of Twitter accounts that tried to discredit marchers using photos of years-old riots and the hashtag #StopHooliganism.
The government is among the outlets’ largest remaining advertisers, and Mwesige worries cash-starved papers may soften their coverage in fear of losing money. (Paulo Ekochu, chairperson of the Media Council of Uganda, a government body that regulates print media, says there’s no evidence of that so far.)
“It had been coming for many years,” Observer editor Lumu wrote in an essay for the ACME website in July. “But the COVID-19 pandemic put a fine point on the impending Armageddon that hovers over the horizon of good old journalism as we have known it.”
Uganda was home to the first independent African newspaper, and its constitution guarantees free expression, but it remains tough for local reporters to aggressively challenge the government.
According to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based nonprofit that advocates for press freedom, President Yoweri Museveni “tolerates no criticism and often uses hate speech in his references to the media,” and authorities have cut off broadcasts, beaten journalists and charged them with treason
The Media Council of Uganda chairperson Ekochu says, disputes that the country is a hostile environment for journalists.
According to a study in the International Journal of Communication, many reporters are also poorly paid, meaning they are more vulnerable to avoiding controversial stories to keep their jobs or taking bribes from sources. And that was before the industry’s very existence was under threat.
The Impact of coronavirus on the future of Print media industry
Uganda is a country of newsstand readers. Before the coronavirus, The Observer distributed about 12,000 copies of each issue to newsstands, but only half that to home subscribers.
However, in March, the government instituted a strict lockdown. Some Ugandans wouldn’t risk leaving home to buy a paper, while others were out of work and couldn’t afford one.
Bashir Muhamed, who sells newspapers from a small metal stand in the city’s central business district, says he lost about 40% of his customers due to coronavirus. When the country loosened restrictions in June, few came back.
“Even now, when people are allowed to move and work, sales have only increased a little,” he says.
He used to pay 1,000 Ugandan shillings (27 cents) every day to buy Bukedde, a Luganda-language paper. But he sells household goods, and people aren’t buying as much sugar and soap.
A newspaper became a luxury item – whatever he makes goes to basic needs, like food
Meanwhile, many outlets couldn’t withstand the losses. The shuttered papers include three local-language dailies – Etop, Rupiny and Entatsi – that were the sole print news sources for their communities.
Even prominent English-language papers, such as New Vision and The Daily Monitor, suffered cuts. The effects were instant. After the tabloid Red Pepper trimmed staff, for example, the paper stressed to report on much of anything outside Kampala.
“We didn’t have enough reporters there to cover the stories and candidates’ rallies, or have our reporters everywhere to be the first to break the stories as we would like to,” says Red Pepper editor Corinth Rebecca Nabukenya.
Rise Of online Media Due to Coronavirus but the struggle was real
As the pandemic wore on, newsstand sales and ad dollars declined. Printing the paper made less financial sense, so for three months, it published only online. As less than a quarter of Ugandans use the internet, meant that fewer people had access to independent news. Even readers who could get online sometimes struggled to download the paper’s PDF version.
At The Observer, the pandemic also took a toll. With splashy covers reminiscent of New York and London tabloids, the English-language weekly is one of the country’s main papers. It prides itself on holding government to account, such as when it recently revealed that the health ministry had broken its promise to follow up with coronavirus patients after they were discharged from the hospital.
Lumu has been a journalist for 15 years. His reporters are hardworking, he says, but with fewer of them, it’s been difficult to scrutinize the government’s pandemic response. Were its actions effective? Were security forces properly deployed?
“We have barely asked questions,” he wrote in his ACME essay. He declined to specify how many employees the newsroom lost.
Similarly, Lumu couldn’t allocate a reporter to each of the 11 presidential candidates, as he had done before. When candidate Bobi Wine and Patrick Amuriat were arrested because their events allegedly violated coronavirus crowd restrictions, Lumu didn’t have enough journalists to report on the full gamut of uprisings.
His remaining staffers risked their safety in interviewing demonstrators and filing dozens of stories – sometimes under the byline “By Our Reporter” to protect them from retribution.
