A growing share of African news and commentary is published straight into inboxes, Telegram channels and messaging apps — content a normal web crawler never sees. Push Media is the CivicSignal component built specifically to watch that layer.
CivicSignal's main discovery cascade (RSS → sitemap → homepage) finds what publishers put on the open web. Push Media exists for everything they publish somewhere else instead.
Newsletters and email bulletins from outlets ranging from major wires (Bloomberg, Financial Times) to independent African newsrooms — captured at the point of delivery, not scraped after the fact.
Public Telegram channels, read via their own public preview pages — no login, no API key. A real and growing distribution channel across West and North Africa in particular.
Public Mastodon accounts and other ActivityPub-based outlets, read via the same open, unauthenticated protocol the fediverse is built on.
A real query — "disinformation" — run against the live Push Media index just now. Results span major wires and independent African newsrooms alike, each auto-tagged by topic and named entity as it's ingested, not after the fact.
Topic pills and named-entity tags shown are the tool's own output for these documents, unedited.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's what the two largest studies of African news consumption and media ecosystems this year both independently found.
WhatsApp reach for news jumped to 62% (+16pp) and TikTok to 58% (+20pp) year-on-year. The report calls out Kenya specifically for the prominence of its "creator layer" on messaging and video platforms — not on news websites.
"News Verifier Africa in Nigeria and Newsghana24 in Ghana use WhatsApp as their primary news platform" — publishers whose main channel a standard website crawl would simply never see.
Publisher/endpoint counts reflect a snapshot of push_media.db at the time this page was last generated — not a live feed. Document/entity totals and the example stories above were pulled live from push-media.civicsignal.africa on 2026-09-09. DNR 2026 figures: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Digital News Report 2026, Kenya country chapter. Project Oasis figures: Project Oasis 2025 Report, Platformisation section.