MediaScapes is a model for reading a country's information ecosystem in one place: the access and conditions people start from, what audiences actually trust and use, how the institutions and money behind the news are structured, and where the openings are to act. Built to help a media strategist, a funder or a regulator see where they can move — not just what already happened.
Traces its lineage to medialandscapes.org, the European Journalism Centre's long-running country-profile project and a fellow Plus Alliance member. The African rollout will build this same model on Code for Africa's own IEA and TIA baselines rather than starting research from scratch.
A media system can't be judged on reach alone, or ownership alone, or trust alone — each one only makes sense next to the others. MediaScapes reads all four together for a single country.
What the population is starting from: internet access, digital skills and civic participation online, drawn from the country's own public statistics.
What people actually use, trust, pay for and avoid — from national audience-survey data, not assumptions about what the market wants.
Who owns what, how concentrated the market is, who regulates it, and the state of the workforce, funding and information-integrity capacity behind it.
What's changing right now — regulatory shifts, funding calls, platform moves — and who is best placed to act on each one.
The same evidence base reads differently depending on who's asking. MediaScapes carries a lens for each of the four people most likely to act on it.
Where distribution and revenue are actually shifting, so product and editorial bets follow real audience behaviour rather than legacy assumptions.
Where independent capacity is thinnest and a grant or programme would close a real gap, not duplicate existing strength.
Where oversight capacity is being stretched across new mandates, and what evidence a pluralism or platform decision would actually rest on.
Where verification and distribution capacity don't yet match the scale of the platforms audiences have already moved to.
This model has already been built and tested once, end to end, as a technology demonstration outside Africa — proof that the approach works before committing to the harder, evidence-scarcer job of doing it here properly.