It’s been two years since we made any big changes at Techjaja, and starting next week, we are going to take you through a tech-roller-coaster. Brace yourselves for several changes; starting from our mission statement, a whole new look and pimped up content that will keep you glued to Uganda’s most informative tech web blog.
So what are we doing here, anyway? Techjaja turns six on November 29th, and we’re in the process of refreshing our entire brand for the next five years. In Refreshing Techjaja, we looked at how a refresh process works, and what it’s like to adapt a brand like Techjaja to a world where media platforms have become a huge thing. The Techjaja brand will now be incorporated into a new established company called RedMint Inc Ltd.
A new mission Statement
When we launched Techjaja in 2013, our founding team was a two man team who’d worked together for a long time. So our mission statement at the time we launched till now has been very simple — It was written for the sake of it:
Techjaja’s mission is to cover the intersection of technology, science, art, and culture from Uganda, Africa and all over the world
What’s striking about that statement, aside from its confidence and brevity, we found it a bit shallow. A few years later, we updated our mission statement to better reflect our more expansive editorial mission. It’s the statement that’s still on our about page today:
Techjaja was founded in 2013 and now with RedMint Inc, will cover an intersection of technology, science, art, and culture. Its mission is to offer a deep-dive reporting and long-form feature stories, breaking tech coverage and product information in a consolidated manner. The site is powered by RedMint’s new Routes platform, and a modern media team for the 21st century.
We feel this statement is great — it is a list what we cover and what’s on our website. But it doesn’t really capture the ambition of our team or the spirit of our brand, and it doesn’t include any mention of audio, video or photography, which have become critical elements of what what people do on the web today. Our goal now is to become a media brand that speaks to audiences on a range of platforms from the web to television. It also includes GDPR compliance for our EU readers. The last statement of the mission will make more sense after major changes take effect by November 26th.
In with the new
A mission statement forces editorial teams to focus on the impact they want to have and what their audience should rely on them for. Without that, our refresh would have been generic and soulless.
The past month has been hell for us, whenever a change has to be made we always have to be careful that it will be beneficial to our readers.— As the EIC and founder, I’ve seen Techjaja grow and define itself from the start, and it’s tempting to believe that everyone else has internalized. We basically wanted to be a household tech brand and we believe we have achieved that. As you will read in our refresh articles next week, our Senior Managing Editor Remmie Ssewankambo did a bunch of interviews with our past Editorial team and found that there were discrepancies between how we all felt about what Techjaja is then and does now, and how we went about expressing those feelings in the work we put on the site every day.
It might seem like a small thing, but it’s what’s going to hold Techjaja’s brand together as it goes beyond being a website, and into the next generation of media. So on November 26th many things are going to change and we shall bring you the tech future in Uganda now.
