Media-startup entanglement in African tech: risks, conflicts, and paths to transparency

I first learned about the story when one of the investors we were speaking to forwarded it. I was working in a leadership capacity at a startup when a journalist published a report on the treatment of service workers in tech startups. In the final third of the piece, the report detailed how an execution glitch had stranded a worker. A few days earlier, we’d walked the journalist through how the failure happened despite our internal processes, and how we’d since addressed it.

Based on this heat, the investor ultimately declined to invest. The headline cost us a term sheet, but it delivered a sharper lesson: in a tight ecosystem, journalism transcends chronicling events; it prices risk, reroutes capital, and reshapes reputations in real time.

I’ve carried a press badge and startup operator roles, which means I’ve sat on both sides of a story; as a source within a company and now, working in a newsroom shaping how these stories are told.

Newsrooms chase narrative authority: the right to tell what happened and why. That authority converts to trust equity, the fuel that powers everything else: a loyal audience, advertising, events, and research. A scoop can set the agenda and keep the audience coming back. 

Startups, on the other hand, chase market dominance. Valuation optics fortify fundraising, a magnetic employer brand lures scarce talent, and a polished public perception keeps regulators calm. Media coverage, good or bad, feeds these levers. 

In a close-knit ecosystem, these divergent motivations are the foundation of tension. 

Traditional newsrooms keep an arm’s length from the subjects of their reporting. Their journalists probe institutions from the outside looking in. The New York Times, for example, maintains transparent firewalls between its reporters and the people they cover. Nigeria’s Premium Times does the same with government ministries. In Kenya, the Nation and its main rival, The Standard, take a similar stance, especially in their investigative units, which have exposed wrongdoings in both corporate boardrooms and government offices without fear or favour. 

A technology-focused publication’s position is uniquely complicated. More often than not, we’re embedded inside the ecosystem we cover. ’s first story, for example, was written from the perspective of an intimate witness. We report on companies that occasionally partner with us, profile founders who attend our events, and sometimes cover investors who may one day sit across from us at a funding table. 

This closeness to the African tech ecosystem, which is smaller, more interconnected, and often fragile, makes the stakes higher and the potential for misunderstandings great. Advertisers might threaten to pull funding over coverage. Founders withhold access when they feel unfairly spotlighted. In Kenya, it’s common for both startups and established tech companies to push back hard—often through PR agencies that hold brief for them—bypassing veiled threats, stalling interviews or warning that critical coverage could jeopardise future collaboration. 

When a reporter starts speaking to sources for what could potentially be a critical story, some founders pull access and urge their teams to go quiet until the noise dies down. From the newsroom’s side, that silence only intensifies curiosity. 

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The startup’s position is easy to understand. In a young ecosystem, a single negative headline can freeze a term sheet, spook regulators, or trigger a customer exodus. We’ve seen firsthand how a story can adversely affect a company’s fortune. But that logic is short-sighted. Silence may slow the reporter, yet it breeds suspicion and forces them to rely on outsiders, who might sometimes be disgruntled ex-employees or leaked documents. Leaving reporters to piece together stories from fragments, hearsay, or leaked documents can easily lead to sensationalism that startups claim is prevalent in tech media. 

But at the centre of all this tension—the press calls, the frantic companywide emails, the attempts to manage the narrative—one question doesn’t go away: Who are we serving? Strip away the headlines, the product launches, late-night edits, and both the startup and the media company are accountable, in different ways, to the same group: users. 

For startups, every product decision ultimately circles back to real people relying on the product or service. Their frustrations, disappointments, and moments of delight are the most accurate measure of whether they’re succeeding. When things break, they break for users. And when those failures become news, the sting, beyond the feeling of embarrassment, is about letting down the users they’re supposed to serve. 

In the newsroom, it’s the same. Every story, whether celebratory or critical, is a service to the reader. The commitment to the audience is to surface the truth, interrogate what’s working and what’s not, and to hold key actors to account. Sometimes, the newsroom gets caught up in the politics of access, and it might forget its fundamental duty. But the real cost of silence, whether from the founders or the media, is always paid by users kept in the dark. 

The cost is in missed warnings, unchecked harm, and sometimes—as in the case of the JAMB result fiasco—real tragedy. If a newsroom is aware of a bug that could cost someone a moment in time, their day, or even their future, and fails to report it, the loss falls to the user. 

The basic contract remains unchanged: if we’re not working in the interests of our users, we’re working against them; by omission or by neglect. 

If the ecosystem remains small, with only a few thousand funded startups, our responsibility is to acknowledge the problem and establish new structures that foster trust in the open. For starters, founders and operators sometimes misunderstand how journalism works and why it exists. One approach to making this better is to hold open sessions that invite founders, operators, and their comms teams to understand the process, making our standards and boundaries clear and demystifying the work for everyone in the ecosystem. 

Also, while journalists might want to cover companies that see them as antagonists, it becomes easier to dehumanise the inner workings of the other side. Newsrooms could explore newsroom-in-residence exchanges. Reporters embed in startups to experience their chaos first-hand. 

When newsrooms and startups engage, the outcome is a better-informed ecosystem and a more knowledgeable general public. This fosters greater transparency and trust, ultimately serving the users who rely on both for truth and effective products. 

Just as investor relations are crucial to a startup’s success, so too are media relations. Founders need to treat journalists not as threats to be managed but as stakeholders to be engaged. Proactive, respectful communication with media outlets is not about controlling the narrative; it’s about building credibility. A company that only speaks to the press when the news is good misses the chance to shape how the bad is understood. 

Until founders see transparent engagement as a form of risk management, and until newsrooms prove that rigorous reporting can coexist with empathy, the flywheel will keep spinning, ever tighter, around the people who can least afford the consequences: the users.

Fu’ad Lawal

Editor-in-chief,

Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to email fuad[@]bigcabal.com, with your thoughts about this edition of NextWave. Or just click reply to share your thoughts and feedback.