About Us

Somali Update is an English-language news site about Somalia, the wider Horn of Africa and the Somali diaspora. We cover politics and security, the economy and the remittance corridors that hold much of it up, humanitarian response, culture and diaspora life. Our readers are in Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Nairobi, the Gulf, Minneapolis, London and Toronto, and many of them know the story in front of us better than we do. That is a useful thing for a newsroom to live with.

We are independently owned, ad-supported and free to read. No paywall, no parent company, no government or party money. The short version of why we exist is that the Horn is usually covered from the outside, in bursts, by people who then leave.

Why we started this

The people who founded Somali Update spent years as the local half of somebody else’s story. Fixing, translating, producing and stringing for wire desks and broadcasters who flew in when something exploded and flew out when it stopped moving. That work is where we learned the beat, and where we learned the shape of the problem we now try to fix.

Our complaint was never parachute reporting as such. Some visiting correspondents are excellent. The problem was the middle of the story, the part nobody stayed for. A displacement site outside a regional capital gets a fortnight of attention while a drought is being declared, then vanishes from the record, though the families in it do not go home when the rains come. An argument over whether people vote directly or through clan delegates shapes more of the country’s future than most attacks do, and it gets covered only when it hardens into a standoff. A ports and corridor agreement is analysed from four foreign capitals in one week, then dropped for the year in which the thing is either built or quietly abandoned.

So the promise here is dull, and it is the entire point. Continuity. We stay on stories after the visiting press has gone, we run the follow-up that gets a tenth of the traffic of the first day, and we keep a file on the slow things: the constitutional review, the fights between the federal government and the member states, the drought-to-displacement pipeline, the bank de-risking that squeezes money transfer operators.

Claims are not facts

Every actor on this beat runs a media operation. A district changes hands and two announcements arrive, one from a government spokesman and one from the group that took it, both written for effect. Casualty figures come from hospitals counting arrivals, from officials with reasons to round down and from insurgent channels with reasons to round up. Verification here is not a box we tick at the end. It is most of the job.

Early on we published a death toll about an hour after an attack, on the strength of one phone call to an official who had not been to the scene. The figure moved twice before morning, and both times we had to move with it. No rival caught us out and no reader complained. We caught ourselves, corrected twice, and disliked every minute of it.

That produced the rule we still work to. A number from a single interested party is not a number, it is a claim, and we mark it as one: attributed, dated, unconfirmed until a second source stands behind it. The decision we got right was a refusal. A claim of responsibility was moving through diaspora messaging groups as screenshots, already reported elsewhere, and we could not verify it came from the channel it was attributed to. We sat on it, and it did not hold up. We have never called a district recaptured on the strength of a press release, and we have taken the traffic hit for that more than once.

How a working day actually runs

The desk starts on the phone rather than on the internet. Before the day’s official statements land, someone is calling contacts in Mogadishu, someone is checking Hargeisa, Garowe or Baidoa, and someone is listening to local radio and reading the Somali-language press that most English coverage of the region never touches.

Anything with a security claim in it passes a second editor before publication, carrying a short verification log: who said this, when, were they there, and what would we need to see to be wrong. If the log is thin, the story waits or runs with the gaps described in the copy. Our editorial standards spell out how that judgement is made and our fact-checking page explains how claims get tested. The last decision most days is about what not to publish, and it is the one we spend longest on.

Who works here

The site is run by a small standing desk of editors, with reporters and regular contributors in the region and across the diaspora. Between them they cover security reporting, federal and member-state politics, the remittance economy, humanitarian work and diaspora affairs. Our managing editor is accountable for everything published.

We do not print a masthead of names and photographs. The reason is unglamorous. Several of the people who report for us live in places where a byline on a security story is a personal risk, and we will not trade their safety for a credibility signal. No story with a contested claim is edited by one person alone. A reader who wants the editor responsible can reach them through our contact page.

Who owns us, and how the money works

The site is owned and run by its founding editorial team through a privately held company. No parent conglomerate above us, no political party or candidate behind us, no state programme funding us, and no advocacy group with a stake in what we publish. Our ownership and funding page sets out the structure and every revenue stream we have.

Advertising pays for the work, which is why the site is free and will stay that way. Buying an ad gets you an ad. It does not get you a preview of a story, a veto over one, a quiet word with the desk, or a friendlier headline. The terms, including the categories we refuse, are published on our advertising page.

Accuracy, and what happens when we get it wrong

We get things wrong. On a beat where much of the primary information is contested, a newsroom claiming otherwise is either lucky or lying. Errors are fixed in public and on the page, with a note saying what changed, rather than edited away in silence. Our corrections policy explains what happens after you report one.

We work to the principles set out by the International Fact-Checking Network, without claiming a membership we do not hold. In practice that means sourcing a reader can follow, claims attributed to whoever makes them, and a clear line between what we have verified, what we report as an allegation, and what we do not yet know.

What we do not do

We do not run sponsored material dressed as news. Commercial content is labelled, visually distinct, and never written by the reporters who cover the same subject. We do not sell coverage, interviews, favourable framing or the removal of a published story, and in election periods we turn down a steady flow of money from people who want a profile that looks like journalism. That refusal has a price, and we knew about it before we started.

We also do not publish photographs of the dead for traffic, we do not report unverified security claims because a competitor already has, and we do not name people accused of things by a single anonymous official. If you think we have broken any of that, write to us at support@somaliupdate.com and say so plainly. The emails we open first are from readers telling us something in a story about their own district is wrong.