ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex intersections between a range of social media platforms and emerging user participatory cultures that are shaping and redefining news production and consumption practices. Mobile-friendly popular social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube are facilitating new interactive broadcast formats that enable audience participation and offer completely new experiences in news consumption and engagement. Cartoons and photoshopped images also constitute important outlets for unsolicited news engagement in Africa, as genres of comic art, digital cartoons and photoshopped images ride on 'distortions and exaggerations that characteristically puncture pretension or single out vulnerable features in a target'. The chapter discusses the changing texture of participatory journalism and news engagement in the broader context of what authors call the 'social media turn' in Africa.
