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The Wire

How the Wire Works

Hornafrika aggregates headlines from other newsrooms so that one page shows what the whole region — and the world — is publishing about the Horn of Africa.

What we take

For each story we store the headline as the publisher wrote it, a short extract of roughly 240 characters, the publication time, the author where the feed provides one, and the link.

What we never take

We do not copy full articles. We do not rewrite other newsrooms’ headlines into our own voice. We do not strip bylines, and we do not present anyone else’s reporting as ours. The full article stays on the publisher’s own site, where their advertising and their byline are.

Copyright

Copyright in every aggregated headline, extract and photograph remains with the newsroom that published it. Hornafrika claims no ownership of any of it. Each item names its publisher, carries a copyright line, and links to the original.

We take only what is needed to tell a reader that a story exists and send them to it — a headline, a short extract, a link. We do not reproduce publishers’ photographs at all: an image is their property and their bandwidth, so the wire carries text only and the picture stays where the article is.

If you publish in the Horn and want your work removed from the wire, write to newsroom@hornafrika.com and we will remove it. We will not ask you to justify the request.

Photography on our own articles

Articles written by the Hornafrika desk carry photographs from Wikimedia Commons published under free licences — Creative Commons, or public domain. Every one names the photographer, states the licence, and links to the original file so the terms can be checked. Where a photograph illustrates a place rather than documenting the specific event reported, the caption says so.

How it is kept separate

Aggregated headlines live in their own section and their own visual style, and are always labelled with the outlet that published them. They never appear in our Trending list, never occupy a homepage lead slot, and are never mixed into our own article feeds. If it is on the wire, we did not report it.

How we fetch

We read publicly published RSS and Atom feeds, at most every twenty minutes per source. Our crawler identifies itself honestly as HornafrikaBot with a contact address. We do not disguise it as a browser to get around a publisher that has chosen to block automated requests — where a publisher blocks us, we record that and leave the source switched off.

How stories reach a country page

A wire item is tagged to a country by what it says, not by who published it. We match country names, capitals, demonyms, major regions and well-known institutions across English, Somali, Amharic, Tigrinya and French. A BBC report about Ethiopia therefore reaches the Ethiopia page, and a Somali newspaper’s report on Colombia does not reach the Somalia page.

The trade-off is that a local story which never names its own country stays on the main wire rather than a country page. We prefer that to the alternative, which put foreign news under the wrong flag.

Which sources

42 feeds are active: newsrooms in Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti, Horn-wide and pan-African outlets, and international broadcasters and wires. Sources are chosen for regional relevance, not for whether they agree with us — the wire deliberately includes outlets whose editorial positions differ sharply from one another.

Outlets that are state-owned or state-funded carry a State-affiliated badge on every headline. We badge rather than exclude: state media is often the only source reporting a given event in this region, and a reader is entitled to know who owns the newsroom before deciding what to make of it.

No Eritrean outlet currently publishes a feed we can reach, so coverage of Eritrea on the wire comes through the international and pan-African sources, matched by subject. We would rather say that plainly than leave the gap unexplained.

Sources currently switched off

These outlets are listed but not being fetched. In most cases their servers refuse automated requests; we leave them off rather than work around it.

Publishers

If you publish one of these outlets and would prefer not to appear on the wire, or would like a different feed used, or want your outlet added, write to newsroom@hornafrika.com. Removal requests are acted on without argument.

Corrections

We cannot correct another newsroom’s article. If a wire headline is wrong, take it up with the publisher — the link goes straight to them. If we have mis-attributed something, or tagged a story to the wrong country, that is ours to fix and you can tell us here.