About Lakatips

Lakatips is a Zambian news index. We gather the day’s headlines from the country’s leading newsrooms into one page, so you can see what is being reported without opening a dozen sites — and then read the stories that matter to you at the source.

Why we built it

Zambia is well served by its journalists. Mwebantu, News Diggers, the Zambia Daily Mail, the Times of Zambia, Lusaka Times, the Daily Nation, Kalemba and a dozen others file steadily through the day, and between them they cover far more ground than any single newsroom could. The difficulty for readers has never been a shortage of reporting. It is that the reporting is scattered.

Most people end up checking two or three sites and missing the rest, or relying on whatever a WhatsApp group happens to forward — often stripped of its source, sometimes days old, and occasionally not true at all. Lakatips exists to close that gap: one page, every newsroom, every story stamped with who reported it and when.

How it works

Every few minutes we check the public feed each newsroom publishes. When a new story appears we record its headline, its opening lines, the time it was published, the section it belongs to and a link to it. That is all we keep.

We do not copy articles. Tap any headline on Lakatips and you get a summary page — the headline, the opening lines, a picture where the publisher provided one, and a button that takes you to the full report on the newsroom’s own site. The reporting, the credit and the traffic stay with the people who did the work. Our copyright and takedown policy sets out how we handle publishers’ material and how to reach us about it.

What we do not do

• We do not write the news. Lakatips has no reporters. Every story you see here was reported by somebody else, and it says so.
• We do not rewrite headlines to change their meaning. Where a newsroom files in block capitals we re-set it in normal case for readability, and nothing more.
• We do not rank stories for money. Advertising never affects which stories appear or where. Commercial placements are labelled.
• We do not hide the source. Every headline, on every page, carries the name of the newsroom that published it.

How stories are ordered

The front page is assembled automatically. Recency counts most, and a story being carried by several newsrooms at once counts for something too — that is usually a sign it matters. We also cap how many stories any one publisher can hold on the front page at a time, so a high-volume newsroom cannot crowd out the rest. The editorial policy explains this in more detail.

Where we are

Lakatips is run from Lusaka. Our office is at 23 Parirenyetwa Road, Rhodes Park. If you have a correction, a question, a story tip or a commercial enquiry, the contact page has our phone numbers and email addresses, and somebody reads everything that comes in.

For publishers

If you run a Zambian newsroom and would like to be included, we would like to hear from you. If you are already here and would prefer we handled your headlines differently — a shorter extract, no picture, or removal altogether — write to us and we will act on it. We would rather be a useful front door for your journalism than a nuisance.