For most of the last decade, coverage of African technology has operated in one of two registers. Either the continent is on the verge of a breakthrough that never quite arrives, or it is a cautionary tale about capital fleeing a difficult market. Both are stories about someone else's expectations. Neither is reporting.
The cost of the boosterish version is not obvious until you look at what it does to founders. A press cycle that treats every raise as a triumph and every shutdown as an embarrassment teaches companies to announce loudly and fail silently. That is precisely backwards. The failures are where the useful information is.
What honest coverage would look like
It would report rounds that do not close. It would name the reasons companies fold, including the unflattering ones. It would treat a regulator's decision as a subject for scrutiny rather than a press release to summarise. And it would stop framing African success as surprising, which is the tell that a story was written for an audience that was not expecting much.
The readers are already there
The argument against this kind of coverage is usually commercial: critical reporting is harder to fund and it annoys the people whose cooperation you need. Both are true. Neither is a reason to publish something else and call it journalism.
The people building on this continent can tell the difference between coverage that takes them seriously and coverage that flatters them. They deserve the first kind, and this publication intends to provide it.