Two co-founders of AllAfrica Global Media - Tami Hultman and Reed Kramer - were honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards during the 2024 African Media Leaders’ Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in May.
The two were recognized for “exceptional contributions to media development in Africa” along with other winners of Excellence Awards , including Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank, veteran African media practitioners and young journalists from a number of countries.
AllAfrica was launched in 2000 to provide visibility for news from and about Africa on the then-expanding internet. Spearheaded by co-founder Amadou Mahtar Ba, the organization forged relationships with news outlets across Africa, aggregating content from over 100 African media partners and national and international non-governmental organizations, and producing original reporting from Africa for an African and global audience.
The two co-founders were recognized for contributing their expertise in investigative reporting, multi-media production and emerging digital tools. They assembled an editorial and engineering team with the expertise to create a pioneering enterprise that was both user-friendly and consistent with the highest standards of news reporting.
Accepting the award on their behalf in Nairobi were two long-time AllAfrica colleagues, chief technology architect Sherrard Burton and Marieme Ba, who manages AllAfrica’s West Africa operations and international Francophone content.
“In my mother tongue, we say witnessing greatness and not magnifying it is a sin,” AllAfrica Executive Chair Amadou Mahtar Ba - a multi-award winner himself, who has been called “Mr. African Media” - said during the awards presentation, referring to his co-founders. ”In an era where the media landscape continues to change at a breathtaking pace, Tamela Hultman and Reed Kramer remain beacons of inspiration, reminding us of the enduring power of truth and the boundless potential of digital innovation.”
Using a next-generation, integrated web-development platform and open-architecture technologies, AllAfrica was able to cost-effectively pull, tag, index, deliver and archive large amounts of multi-media content and develop new applications in both English and French. The company’s website quickly emerged as a trusted source of reporting from a continent that was routinely overlooked by media in other parts of the world. Setting AllAfrica apart was a commitment to curating and delivering local news reporting from African countries to a global audience.
For two successive years – 2002 and 2003, allAfrica.com was nominated as “Best News Site” – alongside the Google and BBC news sites by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, whose Webby awards were called “the Oscars of the Internet”. In 2005, AllAfrica was presented the Africa Economic Developer Award by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in recognition of a “pioneering effort to present news from and about Africa to the world.”
Beginning in 2006, the company transferred day-to-day operations from an initial base in Washington, DC to editorial hubs in Cape Town and Dakar with news and technology personnel also working from Nairobi, Monrovia, Johannesburg, Abuja, Abidjan and other cities. The growth included diversification from web-only distribution to a multi-channel platform that includes dissemination on social media, as well as the Google and Apple News apps and through the AllAfrica News Wire to commercial distributors including on Dow Jones/Factiva, LexisNexis, Comtex News Network, Bloomberg, Moody’s NewsEdge and Tagaday (Europe), which serve tens of millions of end users across the world.
Amid persistent financial challenges, AllAfrica has relied on constant innovation, dedicated staff and cost-efficient operations to survive and grow, even as better funded competitors failed. The explosion of connectivity and mobile devices throughout Africa has provided AllAfrica with greater reach and growing impact across the continent, as well as new opportunities when independent media worldwide are searching for sustainable business models.
Today, AllAfrica’s multi-channel platform remains the only comprehensive all digital panAfrican news and information source – of, by and about Africa – relied upon by decision makers and leaders in government, business, international organization and media, as well as by a younger generation who share a panAfrican identity and want a collaborative platform to help them address the common challenges they face.
Prior to co-founding AllAfrica, Hultman and Kramer spent 25 years at Africa News Service (ANS), a non-profit U.S.-based agency that produced prize-winning news and information for broadcast and print media. With Executive Director Bertie Howard, who also served on the board of the National Summit on Africa, the organization became known as the only consistent source of news about Africa in the United States. Howard now serves as board chair of the AllAfrica Foundation, which connects young African and African-American women journalists under the banner of the Chalayne Hunter-Gault Fellowship.
For two decades, the organization produced the only Africa-focused national radio service and news publication in the United States - Africa News – as well as periodic special reports on such topics as media coverage of Africa , the anti-apartheid struggle in the United States, crisis in Somalia in the early 1990s, and U.S.-Liberia ties post Cold War . In 1994 - when there were only a few thousand web sites worldwide – ANS launched the first Africa-related online information web site - africanewsonline.org , the predecessor for allafrica.com .
The extensive collection of materials assembled by ANS over the course of more than two decades is housed in the Dr. John Hope Franklin collection at the Duke University Library, where it is regularly accessed by scholars. The Leroy T. Walker Africa News Service Archive is named in honor of the long-time member and chair of the ANS Board of Directors, who served as chancellor of North Carolina Central and was the first African-American president of the United States Olympic Committee.
The awardees have travelled extensively, interviewing heads of state and government, institutional and business leaders, and Africans in communities across the continent. They have reported - separately and sometimes jointly - for a range of international media outlets, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, London Observer, Le Monde diplomatique, the Tanzania Daily News, the Daily Nation (Nairobi), National Public Radio (U.S), the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC. In 2009, along with chief correspondent Charlie Cobb, Jr., they conducted the only interview President Barack Obama granted at the White House before his first visit to Africa as president.
Hultman has served as executive producer for a National Public Radio series on Africa in the post-Cold War world, consulted for the NBC ‘Today’ Show on Africa, and overseen pan-African coverage for the launch of SABC Africa’s television channel. She authored a 1974 front-page series in the Washington Post after making the first visit to Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara by an American journalist. She has written scholarly critiques of western media coverage of Africa, including an examination of media’s role during the 1994 massacres in Rwanda – “ Savage Beasts and Beastly Savages ” and a chapter for the book Africa’s Media Image , published by Praeger in 1992. Her recent focus has been food security and health reporting, particularly maternal/child survival, malaria, access to care - especially amid conflict – and vaccine equity.
At AllAfrica, she was executive producer of the radio series Dateline Africa, which was aired nationwide on public and commercial stations and in 1994 won the World Hunger Media Award presented at the United Nations and a National Association of Black Journalists prize for distinguished reporting. She produced and edited The Africa News Cookbook: African Cooking for Western Kitchens , published by Viking/Penguin) in 1986.
She is a graduate of Duke University with Master’s and PhD degrees from the University of North Carolina, where she was a Freedom Forum Fellow. She was the founding Director of the Center for Africa and Media at Duke University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the African Studies Association and the International Women’s Media Foundation.
Much of Kramer’s reporting has focused on U.S.-Africa relations, including chronicling policy changes in successive administrations and the evolution of American trade and investment with the continent. He authored in-depth examinations of U.S. diplomatic and economic ties with apartheid South Africa that were published in major newspapers across the United States, plus numerous articles on U.S. relations with Nigeria, Liberia, Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Horn. He has served as an on-air guest for CNN, BBC and the PBS NewsHour. He is a graduate of Duke University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The couple began their Africa journey with a two-year research and teaching assignment in east and central Africa and in southern Africa, where they investigated the role of American companies operating under apartheid in South Africa, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and Namibia (then South African-controlled Southwest Africa). They were expelled from South Africa by the apartheid government in 1971.
They served as consultants on southern Africa for the World Council of Churches in Geneva and with the Corporate Information Center of the National Council of Churches in New York. In 1972, they co-authored Church Investments, Corporations, and Southern Africa , the first extensive examination of American companies under apartheid, and they produced published reports on U.S investments in South Africa-controlled Namibia and on sanctions-busting by American oil companies in Rhodesia.
In 2001, they were named co-recipients of the Special Recognition Media Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Africa America Institute in New York.
