Every morning, someone decides what Africa reads first.
Usually it is not one person. Often it is not a person at all. It is a recommendation algorithm tuned for engagement, a foreign desk deciding which of fifty-four countries deserves a slot today…or a cousin who forwards a voice note to the family WhatsApp group before breakfast.
The continent has no shortage of journalism. What it lacks is a shared front page. And the question of who assembles one, and how, deserves more attention than it gets.
I was born in Ghana and live in the United States, but my relationship with newspapers started very early. My older cousins still brag that I started reading newspapers when I was only six years old. I vaguely remember the age, but I clearly remember the scene.
In 1986, our 15-inch black-and-white family TV was stolen. Overnight, the house went quiet. For entertainment, for company, for anything to do after school, all I had were the newspapers my uncle brought home from work. He would come in with a stack of papers, and I would spread them across the living room floor, sit in the middle and read the Daily Graphic, Ghanaian Times, the weekend Spectator and the Mirror from front to back. I feasted on everything. In the early 1990s, when The Ghanaian Chronicle arrived, I especially waited for whatever the late Paul Ansah wrote. If he wrote it, I read it.
That early habit, born of a stolen TV and a living room full of newsprint, is why I built AfricaFrontPage.com. Last month, I launched what I thought would be a simple technical project: a single, public page of African headlines, refreshed throughout the day, drawing from more than 190 outlets across 45 countries. It is not a newsroom: it writes no stories and employs no reporters. Every headline links directly to the publisher who reported it.
I expected the hard part to be the code. It was not. The hard part was learning that every technical choice is an editorial choice.
The first choice is who gets in. An aggregator inherits the shape of the web it reads. Large private outlets in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg publish clean, reliable feeds. Many smaller or poorer newsrooms do not, and some of the best-known sites block automated readers entirely. To include them, I have to route through Google News, which means a global platform still sits between those publishers and their readers. An automated front page quietly favours outlets that can afford good digital infrastructure. That is not the same as favouring good journalism, and it is a bias I am still working to correct.
The second choice is what to do with state media. In much of Africa, the state broadcaster or news agency is the only outlet with correspondents in every region. It is often the first to carry an official announcement. It is also, in some countries, the voice of whoever holds power. On AfricaFrontPage, I chose to include state outlets, from Ghana’s GBC and the Ghanaian Times to Angola’s ANGOP and Senegal’s APS, alongside independent ones, because leaving them out would leave gaps in the historical record.
But inclusion is not neutrality. On a page, a headline from a government daily looks identical to one from an independent newspaper. My approach for now is to place several versions of the same story side by side, so readers can see where accounts diverge. I am not sure it is enough.
The third choice is language. A pan-African page that reads only in English is really an anglophone page with a broad name. Today, about fifty of the outlets on AfricaFrontPage publish in French and six in Portuguese, from Abidjan and Bamako to Luanda, Maputo and São Tomé. Even that leaves obvious holes. I have no Arabic-language sources yet, so North Africa appears largely through English and French. Apart from two Somali-language outlets, the continent’s own languages (Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, Yoruba, Twi and many more) are almost entirely absent. Machine translation can carry a headline from English into French, or even into Swahili, Hausa or Twi, but it cannot invent a source that no one has indexed.
The fourth choice is the hardest: what goes at the top. Any front page needs a lead. My first rule was simple: choose the newest hard-news story from a major outlet and skip opinion, sponsored content and press releases. The result was a front page full of workshops and ministerial courtesy calls.
So the system now gives weight to stories that several outlets are covering at once, and to words that signal real stakes: arrests, deaths, corruption, protests. That makes the page livelier. It also risks reproducing the very logic I set out to resist. A scoring rule that rewards scandal and disaster will, over time, tell the same story about Africa that global outlets tell, only faster. When one story dominates, what readers lose is not just the other stories. They lose any sense of proportion. A coup in one capital can push aside an election in another, a court ruling, or a drought that has been building for months. The site still lets a human editor, my partner Adah Johnson or me, pin a story for a couple of hours when the automatic choice feels wrong. That is an admission that judgment cannot be fully automated.
The final choice is where the reader ends up. I decided early that on AfricaFrontPage, every click on a headline must leave my site and land on the original publisher’s website. Nothing is copied or rewritten. That is a matter of fairness (publishers pay reporters; aggregators do not) and a matter of survival. A front page that keeps readers to itself starves the newsrooms it depends on. Platforms that summarise the news inside their own walls, whether in a social feed or an AI chatbot’s answer, are making the opposite bet. African publishers, already thin on advertising, will feel it first.
The Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report found that 53% of its Nigerian sample, mostly younger, English-speaking internet users, used WhatsApp for news each week, against a global average of 19%. Its 2026 report on Nigeria describes influencers acting as “curators and amplifiers” of stories, while publishers say they are losing advertising and web traffic to digital platforms. The front page has not disappeared. It has been privatised and personalised, and no one is accountable for it.
I do not have clean answers to these questions. We built AfricaFrontPage.com as one small, public attempt to make those choices visible, argued over and open to correction. Because if Africans are going to read the continent through a front page, it is better that we know who built it, how it works, and why.
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