The kinds of apps that are currently thriving in Africa complicate this transition. Tapping into local needs, like Kenya's personal banking behemoth Mpesa did, is key. As such, many believe participatory media (which tends to be hyperlocal) will overshadow mainstream media companies in Africa's growing app landscape.

"The actual people with content are radio stations, newspapers," points out Hersman. "The problem is that they haven't figured out how to bridge to the pure digital side yet." To do this, Hersman says, mainstream media will ultimately have to start engaging with their audience, or rather, provide a way for audiences to engage with them.

People are looking for ways to "engage with the media around issues that are important to [them]. The media still has the megaphone," explains Hersman. "You have to plug into social channels that are already there," he says. "Allow [ordinary people] to have not just a 'read' channel but a 'read-and-write' channel."

Still, the possibilities for a mainstream media app are nascent: "How you engage with 40 million people and still have some kind of sanity – because that can be a lot of comments that can be a lot of interactivity – that's the trick that hasn't been figured out."

Challenges and changes

Mobile-ized Africa is a fragmented place. It's not a region where an app can be "written once and run anywhere," according to MobileActive, an organization that tracks mobile journalism trends on the continent. 

For one, smartphones are problematic. Each brand has its own unique coding language. Unlike designing a site for web browsers, there is no way to build a mobile app that works across all operating systems. Nokia, Google's Android, Apple's iPhone, BlackBerry, Hitachi and Windows Phone 7 are just some of the platforms developers in Africa are scrambling to cover. (Hersman calls the situation "ridiculous.")

Moreover, access to the Web does not come cheap. According to the Canadian International Development Research Center, Internet costs are up to 100 times higher in Africa than in other parts of the world. "Although there may be access to the Internet, it's so unaffordable to the average consumer, it's irrelevant," says Gosier.

The expense Gosier is referring to is tied to satellite licensing fees, costs that are passed along to consumers. More than 50 satellites orbit above the continent acting as Internet providers. Geographic realities make it difficult to install landlines and fiber optic cables, which are potentially cheaper solutions.

But the largest obstacle is longevity. An app's lifespan is not guaranteed, and one that runs on an Android today may not run on the phone's next generation. This is because mobile carriers, not manufacturers, decide what software features they want to support on a given phone. Hersman has said that Africa's carriers operate in a "wild west atmosphere," but this is starting to change. Network operators East Africa, for example, are beginning to share infrastructure. People in the region can now use their phones without having to change SIM cards whenever they cross national borders.

These phone chips might hold the answer for print media looking to go digital. "If I were running a print media house, what I would do is distribute content by publishing some sort of SIM card," muses Gosier. Sending data directly to a device in this way, he explains, bypasses the continent's fragmented mess of phone networks. "I haven't seen anyone trying to figure [this out]," he says. "It's delivering content through the thing that people are already consuming en masse – the SIM chip."