Goodbye to the digital divide? - 27 Jul 2009

The 2009 edition of Trends in Newsrooms was released last week and apart from looking at ways in which to integrate new media into the newsroom it also looks at the role the internet plays in African journalism. Africa isn't quite as online as the rest of the world and while the internet may herald numerous advantages in the profession, the lack of access for a majority of the African population makes plugging those interesting new techniques difficult. Hopefully though, the switching on of Seacom may hasten the progress of the digital age on the continent. Seacom went live last Thursday, 23 July 2009 with a demonstration to show off the capacity, quality of bandwidth and connectivity the network could provide. Various countries on the African east coast were witness to the potential advantages of Seacom. Is it time to bid farewell to the digital divide? The new fibre-optic network is proclaimed to be faster and at the same time cheaper; we still hold our collective breath in anticipation to see whether all the hype is actually justifiable.