Investigating the impact of digital transformation on legacy media in Uganda: the case of new vision newspaper.

This study sought to investigate the impact of digital transformation on legacy media in Uganda, using the leading English newspaper, New Vision, as a case study. Employing qualitative methods, including documentary analysis and interviews with 13 senior editors, circulation and finance managers, and media scholars, the study evaluated the impact of digital transformation on New Vision, examined revenue streams, and assessed the newspaper’s content strategy effectiveness. Findings reveal that while digital technology enhanced news gathering and distribution efficiency, it diminished the newspaper\u27s ability to break stories, leading to declining sales and revenue. New Vision\u27s attempts to monetise digital content face challenges due to low online subscription rates, prompting cost-cutting measures that compromise content quality. Diversification into non-media ventures and reliance on non-profit agency funding raise sustainability concerns. The study recommends re-evaluating downsizing, streamlining business ventures, exploring government funding cautiously, and considering a freemium paywall model. Crucially, it advocates for a streamlined non-profit revenue model, proposing the establishment of a foundation dedicated to funding investigative public interest journalism

Re-membering Mwanga: same-sex intimacy, memory and belonging in postcolonial Uganda

Proponents of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014 have denounced homosexuality as an import from the West. Yet every June, hundreds of thousands of Christian pilgrims in Uganda commemorate a set of events, the hegemonic textual accounts of which pivot around the practice of native ‘sodomy’. According to these accounts, the last pre-colonial Kabaka (king) Mwanga of Buganda ordered the execution of a number of his male Christian pages in 1886 when, under the influence of their new religion, they refused his desire for physical intimacy. These events have assumed the place of a founding myth for Christianity in Uganda as a result of the Catholic Church’s canonization of its martyred pioneers. This article explores how public commemoration of these events can coexist with the claim that same-sex intimacy is alien to Uganda. Unlike previous scholarship on the martyrdoms, which has focused primarily on colonial discourse, the article pays attention to contemporary Ugandan remembering of the martyrdoms. And against the grain of queer African historical scholarship, which seeks to recover the forgotten past, it explores the critical possibilities immanent within something that is intensively memorialized. The article maps Ugandan public memory of the martyrdoms, unravelling genealogies of homophobia as well as possibilities for sexual dissidence that lurk within public culture