Dogbevi saw into the future of online journalism – Gifty Bingley writes

Gifty Bingley is a consummate communication professional, who once worked as a journalist. She has recently started writing a series on leadership excellence in which she profiles her professional friends.

In this part she writes about the Managing Editor of Ghana Business News, Emmanuel K. Dogbevi.

In 2010, when I transitioned from journalism to a communications manager role, one of my first priorities was meeting political desk editors at major news organizations. At the time, print still dominated, and online media was still evolving in Africa – internet and mobile phone penetration were low, and most Ghanaians still got their news from newspapers and radio. Only a handful of independent digital business news portals existed.

Emmanuel K. Dogbevi was one of those early believers who saw the future of online journalism when most were still buying newspapers in 2008. While legacy media reluctantly added website versions of their radio and print editions, he was building something different – an online-first business news platform with original reporting, not repurposed content.

I looked him up and visited his modest office in Laterbiokoshie. No fancy Cantonments address, no corporate backing – just him, a laptop, and an unshakeable conviction that digital journalism was the future. That meeting left an impression. Here was someone building a media empire from scratch while others waited for infrastructure to catch up.

Seventeen years later, he was right.

Please meet Emmanuel K. Dogbevi, a multiple award-winning Ghanaian investigative journalist who turned that modest office into Ghana Business News, one of the country’s leading independent business platforms. He is also the Executive Director of NewsBridge Africa, strengthening journalists capacity across the continent, and was recently elected Vice President of The African Editors Forum (TAEF).

For 35 years, Emmanuel has championed accountability journalism, the kind that makes the powerful uncomfortable. His investigations into e-waste, natural resource exploitation, illicit financial flows, and corruption haven’t just won awards; they’ve changed laws. His exposés on illegal rosewood exports and Chinese illegal mining prompted government action and regulatory reforms. That is journalism with consequences.

But what sets Emmanuel apart isn’t just his reporting, it’s his commitment to lifting others. He has trained hundreds of journalists across Africa in investigative techniques and financial reporting. When the grants stopped, he created ‘The Journalism Hangout’ in 2019 – a sustainable model that has trained more than 100 Ghanaian journalists without donor support.

A Columbia University graduate and Knight-Bagehot Fellow, Emmanuel could have taken the comfortable path. Instead, he chose to build independent media in Ghana and across Africa, proving that quality journalism can thrive without compromising integrity.

That modest office I visited in 2010? He moved it to the High Street, and lost everything to a fire. But setbacks never deterred him, it was never about the space, it was about the vision. And he has spent nearly two decades proving that vision right, one investigation and one trained journalist at a time. #MyCircle #LeadershipExcellenceSeries

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