In a bid to get African youth interested in current affairs, Newz Beat, a Ugandan original news program features ‘rap-orters’ who rap headlines to hip hop beats. Scoop has more:
Hip-hop is probably the last thing you’d expect to hear when listening to a news bulletin, which is exactly what makes Newz Beat so intriguing. Yahoo news reports that the show is quite relevant in Uganda, where the press faces lots of problems with censorship, and the youth aren’t too interested in what’s happening around them. A program that features ‘rap-orters’ instead of traditional anchors is actually quite refreshing.
Newz Beat is produced by Paul Fazone, a Ph.D. graduate from Annenberg and founder of Peripheral Vision International. He conceived the idea for the show in 2013, while trying to answer the question: “How can we engage pop culture and existing ways of distributing media in a way that people would pick up the content on their own?” Since the average age of Uganda’s population is only 15.5 years, Falzone knew that he had to create a unique way of capturing their attention. Before long, he realised that rapping was the answer to his question.