This article is a commentary on findings reported in Afrobarometer Dispatch No. 1173, “How Africans get their news is changing – how much they get might not be,” by Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz, Komi Amewunou, and Kelechi Amakoh. Views expressed in this commentary are those of the author.
There is a quiet revolution happening across Africa, and most communications professionals are either behind it or barely ahead of it.
For decades, the radio tower was the most powerful communications infrastructure on the continent. Governments used it. NGOs relied on it. Brands built campaigns around it. And with good reason: Radio reached people where television could not, where newspapers never arrived, and where the Internet was a distant promise.
That logic is being tested. Not shattered, not yet, but tested in ways that demand attention from every communicator, PR practitioner, and digital strategist working in or with Africa today.
New data from Afrobarometer’s Round 10 surveys covering 50,961 interviews across 38 African countries in 2024/2025 offer the clearest picture yet of how Africans are getting their news and what that means for how information should be designed, distributed, and amplified going forward. The numbers tell a story of transition. Something old is losing ground. Something new has plateaued before it fully arrived. And in that gap, there is both an opportunity and an obligation for digital communicators to act.
Print is not declining. It is collapsing.
Let us be direct about newspapers, because the data demand directness. In 2014, 23% of Africans regularly read a newspaper. By 2025, that figure stands at 13%. Nearly half the newspaper-reading audience on the continent has disappeared in a single decade. Only one in eight Africans now read a newspaper regularly. Only one in 20 read one every day.
For communications professionals who still measure campaign success by press coverage, print exclusives, and relationships with features editors, this is not a trend to monitor. It is a structural challenge that requires a different response.
Younger Africans have effectively left print behind. The 18- to 35-year-old cohort regularly consume news via social media, making them the only age group on the continent where social media edges out radio as the most used news source. They are building their understanding of the world through timelines and group chats, not front pages. The editorial gatekeeping that newspapers once provided by filtering, verification, and institutional authority is being replaced by algorithmic curation and peer sharing in ways that change not just where information travels but how it is trusted.
For communications practitioners, this means the skills the industry spent decades refining are shifting in value. Writing a compelling press release for a news editor, cultivating a relationship with a columnist, timing a story for the morning print run are becoming less central to communications success. What is rising in value is the ability to create content that travels through digital networks, that earns engagement rather than coverage, and that is designed for a screen rather than a page.
Radio is fading. Do not write the obituary yet.
Radio’s decline is more nuanced than that of newspapers, and communicators who dismiss it prematurely will make expensive strategic mistakes.
Yes, radio is losing ground. Its regular audience has fallen from 71% in 2014 to 61% in 2025, a loss of 10 percentage points over a decade. The gap between radio and social media has narrowed from nearly 50 points to just 9. On their current trajectories, social media will likely overtake radio as Africa’s primary news medium within the next survey round or two.
But the data reveal something that every communicator working on inclusive impact needs to understand: Radio has no geographic gap. Urban residents consume radio news at 59%. Rural residents consume it at 60%. Essentially identical. No other medium comes close to this kind of geographic equity. Television reaches 69% of urban Africans but only 35% of rural ones. Social media reaches 65% of urban Africans and only 34% of rural ones.
Radio also bridges the poverty divide in a way no digital medium currently does. Among Africans experiencing no lived poverty, 62% consume radio news regularly. Among those experiencing high lived poverty, the figure is 55%. That’s a gap of just 7 percentage points. Compare that to social media, where the gap between the well-off and the poorest is 35 points. Radio is the only medium that reaches majority audiences across all income groups.
What this means practically is straightforward. If your campaign needs to reach rural Africans, poor Africans, older Africans, or less formally educated Africans, radio is not a legacy channel you are tolerating while you wait for digital penetration to catch up. It is the most strategically sound choice available to you right now.
The real strategic error is treating radio and social media as competitors. They are not reaching the same people. A communications strategy that abandons radio in pursuit of social media impressions is not becoming more modern. It is becoming more exclusive.
Social media grew fast. Then it stopped.
Here is the finding that should most concern digital strategists, and it is the one receiving the least attention in the conversation about African media: Social media’s growth as a news channel has stalled.
From 2010 to late 2014, social media use for news in Africa grew rapidly and consistently. Then it slowed. Between 2021/2023 and 2024/2025, growth decelerated significantly. Other Internet news sources actually declined by 5 percentage points over the same period. The platform that communicators assumed would keep growing toward universal reach appears to be approaching a structural ceiling.
The barriers are not technological. They are economic and political. Africa has the highest mobile data costs relative to income of any continent in the world. Large portions of the population cannot afford Internet-enabled devices. Digital-literacy gaps remain significant, and several governments have responded to the growth of digital media with Internet shutdowns, social media taxes, and content restrictions that limit access further.
For digital communications professionals, this plateau carries a direct implication. The audience currently reachable via social media is an increasingly well-defined demographic: urban, younger, educated, and relatively well off. This is a valuable audience for many communications purposes. But this is Africa, and strategies built entirely on digital channels are, by design, choosing not to communicate with a very significant portion of the population.
The plateau is also, in a different light, an opportunity. As growth slows and the platform ecosystem matures, the communicators who invest in quality rather than volume with well-designed content, authentic storytelling, and data-driven narratives that the audience genuinely wants to engage with will separate themselves from those still optimising for follower counts and vanity metrics.
Young Africans changed the game. Here is what that actually means.
Among adults aged 18-35, social media has already overtaken radio as the primary news source. Almost six out of 10 young Africans (58%) consume news via social media regularly, compared to 55% via radio. This is the first generation in African history for whom digital media is the default information environment.
By the time you reach Africans over 55, the picture is reversed completely. Radio reaches 68% of that age group. Social media reaches 28%.
For brands, public institutions, NGOs, and development organisations communicating with a multigenerational African public, this data make one thing very clear: A single-channel strategy is a structural mistake regardless of which channel you choose. If you go all in on social media, you are designing for youth and urban connected audiences while leaving older, rural, and less connected populations largely unreached. If you stay with radio as your primary channel, you are speaking to an audience that is aging and declining while the next generation moves elsewhere.
The answer is not simply to use both channels. It is to design communications strategies that are coherent across both, with messages shaped for the specific affordances of each medium, and with an honest reckoning of whom each channel reaches and whom it does not.
What this demands of the profession
The data are clear enough. What communicators do with them is the real question.
The news release needs a redesign, not a retirement.
The traditional press release was engineered for a world in which newspapers were the primary distribution vehicle for public information. That world is ending in Africa. This does not mean the press release as a form is dead, but treating it as the primary output of a communications campaign is increasingly a category error.
The modern African press release needs to be designed for digital first, that is, it must have a headline that works as a social caption, a key finding visualised for easy sharing, a format that reads well on a mobile screen, and a lead that earns attention in the first two sentences without assuming the reader will make it to Paragraph 4.
WhatsApp is doing more work than your analytics can see.
The Afrobarometer data measure formal social media platforms. They do not capture the WhatsApp layer, which has become arguably the most consequential information distribution channel in Africa. Family groups, professional networks, alumni associations, community clusters – all of these WhatsApp networks function as a parallel news ecosystem that moves content to audiences who will never follow a brand’s official social media account. For communications practitioners, understanding this layer, and navigating it ethically, is one of the most important and least-discussed competencies in African digital communications today. If your content is not designed to travel through WhatsApp, it is not designed for Africa.
Reach is not enough. Whom you are reaching is the question.
If the total news audience has not grown despite a decade of digital expansion, then impressive engagement numbers need to be interrogated more carefully. Thousands of likes and shares from an urban, educated, connected audience may represent genuine communications success within that demographic. But if the goal was broad public communication, those numbers are telling only part of the story. Communicators need to build honest audience mapping into their measurement frameworks – not just how many people did the content reach, but who were those people, and who was systematically missed.
Do not optimise away from the people who need the information most.
This is the harder conversation. Communications professionals working in development, public health, governance, and social change – areas where reaching the most marginalised populations is not a secondary consideration but the primary one – need to resist the pull toward digital-first strategies driven by platform analytics. The communities most in need of accurate, timely, relevant information are often the least digitally connected. Radio, community media, and hybrid approaches that carry digital content into non-digital environments are not compromises. They are the strategy.
The question the numbers cannot answer
The Afrobarometer data contain one finding that goes beyond channel strategy and touches on something more fundamental for the profession.
Across 38 countries, only 6% of Africans say they posted about politics or community affairs on social media in the past year. Only 6% say they contacted a media outlet. Despite the explosion in social media access over the past decade, the proportion of Africans actively participating in public discourse through digital channels remains tiny. They are consuming. They are not producing. They are scrolling, not speaking.
This is both an observation about the nature of social media engagement and a direct challenge to communications practitioners. If digital media is to fulfil its democratic promise on this continent, and if it is to become a genuine tool for accountability, for voice, for the kind of participation that Afrobarometer’s own mission speaks to when it says “Let the people have a say,” then the communications industry has a role in designing digital environments and content strategies that invite participation rather than passive consumption.
The shift from radio to social media is not just a distribution change. It is a potential transformation in the relationship between information and power. Radio is inherently one-directional in the sense that a broadcaster speaks and an audience listens. Social media is theoretically multi-directional – audiences can respond, challenge, share, and amplify. The question for every communicator is whether we are designing our work to realise that potential, or whether we are simply using social media as a more targeted broadcast medium that is just replicating the one-way dynamic of radio with better segmentation tools and prettier graphics.
That is the question the data raise. Answering it is the work.
The signal has shifted. Have you?
Africa’s media in 2025 is a landscape in genuine transition. Radio is declining but not finished. Newspapers are collapsing, but the journalism that powered them is finding new channels. Social media has transformed who receives information and how fast it travels, but it has not yet transformed the depth or quality of public participation. And through all of this change, the same proportion of Africans are consuming news as a decade ago, which tells us that the revolution so far has been about channels, not audiences.
The communicators who will matter in the next decade of African public discourse are not those who picked the right platform. They are those who understood the whole landscape, designed strategies honest about whom they were reaching and whom they were missing, and built their work around the people at the edges of the information environment rather than the people already at the centre of it.
The signal has shifted. The question is whether our strategies have shifted with it.
Photo credit: www.solidaridadnetwork.org