E-Media Tidbits

africa.reuters.com The new Reuters Africa mini-site organizes stories by country, with both text and graphical navigation.

Yesterday, Reuters debuted a new mini-site which offers news and views from across Africa.

Reuters Africa takes an interesting approach. Its design resembles the rest of the Reuters site, but the content is presented by country. You can select countries from an image map of the continent, or from a drop-down menu.

Particularly interesting, I think, is that the site brings in African headlines syndicated from the Berkman Institute's international blog aggregator Global Voices Online. If there are "recent" (a term that seems to extend back a least a month or two, in some cases) GVO blog posts from or about a particular African nation, then the top-right corner of that nation's Reuters page will offer a section heading "Blogs." There you'll find relevant headlines that link to posts presented on the GVO site.

Africa hasn't been getting nearly enough attention for, well, just about forever. It'll be interesting to see whether this site becomes popular.

A couple of minor nits: As far as I could tell, Reuters Africa doesn't yet offer its own feeds -- either for the site as a whole, or by country. Nor does it appear to offer a mobile edition. It occurs to me that perhaps one of the core potential audiences for this site is, well, Africans -- and there, cell phones are far more prevalent than computers.

For more about this site, see the Reuters release.

(Thanks to Ty Trippet of Reuters for the tip.)