The Continent: Africa’s ambitious newspaper, designed for WhatsApp

The South African newspaper ‘The Continent’ on the screen of a mobile phone, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Continent is a weekly newspaper distributed for free, and only via WhatsApp, the most widely used messaging system in Africa. Even though it's published as a PDF and distributed on a messaging platform, The Continent feels like an old-fashioned newspaper: Catchy headlines, short stories, reported pieces and interviews. — AFP

JOHANNESBURG: Late one night, South African journalist Simon Allison woke up his wife with an idea: a weekly African newspaper for Africans, distributed via WhatsApp.

She told him to go back to sleep, and “keep it for the morning”. But that was the birth of The Continent, in the middle of the pandemic.