CivicSignal
Every publisher, with its unique topical signature

Fingerprints

Every publisher's topical fingerprint — the unique mix of subjects it covers, sized by how active it's been. Two outlets can publish the same volume of stories and look nothing alike here. Filter by country, language and topic, or flip a card for ownership, reach and social detail.

All profiled publishers

Browse the full set, or narrow it down below.

How the Engagement Index is calculated

Shown on each publisher card, wherever social data is available. A CivicSignal-derived metric, built entirely from data already in the corpus.

Platform breadth · 65% weight

How many of the tracked platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Mastodon) a publisher has any followers on, as a share of the total tracked. This reflects Project Oasis's own finding that platform breadth is the strongest predictor of a publisher's influence (Spearman ρ=0.90).

Reach vs. peers · 35% weight

Total followers across all platforms, log-scaled since raw counts are extremely skewed, then ranked against peers of the same source type in the same country — a Creator is only compared to other Creators, a digital-native publisher only to other digital-native publishers, and each is measured against its own market, not Nigeria's or Kenya's ceiling. Where a country's pool of that type is too small to rank against meaningfully, we compare against that type across all countries instead, rather than fall back to a mixed pool of different source types.

Data availability

Social data exists for 70.2% of tracked publishers overall (603 of 859) — but coverage isn't even across source types: 90.5% of digital-native publishers have it, versus 64.3% of Creators and just 2.1% of Push Media sources (newsletters, Telegram, fediverse). Wherever it's missing, the card shows no score and no badge — never a silent zero.

Why not comments, likes or shares. We looked closely at this first. Across a random sample of 105 tracked publishers, we checked each site's actual comment records directly, not just what's visible on the page: 87 had comments technically enabled on a recent story — and none had a single real comment on it. Share buttons, wherever they appeared, only opened a share dialog; they didn't display a running count, since that kind of public count disappeared from most platforms years ago. In short, per-article "likes, reads and shares" aren't something any outlet in this dataset actually exposes — so rather than fabricate a metric no one can see, this index is built entirely from reach signals that are genuinely public and verifiable.
Comparing apples to apples. Reach is ranked only against peers of the same source type in the same country — a Creator against other Creators, a digital-native publisher against other digital-native publishers — never against each other. An individual Creator and a national newsroom operate at completely different scales, so measuring one against the other would say nothing meaningful about either.

The map is moving. CivicSignal is how you keep up with it.

Investigate the full spectrum of Africa's media landscape — from legacy broadcasters to digital-native newsrooms, creator-journalists, and the newsletters and channels that never touch a website.

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