South African journalist and editor Simon Allison has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Coda Story, bringing his experience building the pan-African newspaper The Continent into a global newsroom experimenting with new ways of reporting and reaching audiences.
Allison, co-founder and former Editor-in-Chief of The Continent, joined Coda Story in February 2026 as a Guest Editor. He has since helped launch The Atlas, a global publication produced through a partnership between Coda Story and The Continent.
As Editor-in-Chief, Allison will lead Coda’s journalism and editorial products, including The Atlas, Coda’s monitoring and early-warning work, digital publishing, and experiments in new forms of journalism and distribution.
“What we’re finding from that monitoring system is that it is throwing up all kinds of interesting stories and patterns and connections across geographies, across borders, across industries,”
Coda Editor Simon Allison
The leadership transition comes as Coda sharpens its model as a journalism studio focused on detecting and investigating long-range shifts in power. Rather than organising its journalism around the daily news cycle, its reporters and researchers monitor sustained currents across countries and over time, looking for emerging patterns before they become conventional news stories.
Coda publishes this work through investigations, newsletters, audio and visual storytelling, partnerships and experimental forms of journalism. Its monitoring work is designed to identify connections across countries, industries and issues that may otherwise remain separate.
The newsroom’s approach is part of a wider shift in journalism that Allison says is changing how information is received, verified and distributed.
“Journalism is in a state of flux at the moment,” he said. “Things are changing about how we receive information, how we verify information, and then how we distribute that information.”
He said the challenge for newsrooms is no longer simply producing quality journalism, but ensuring that audiences can find and engage with it.
“Doing the journalism is no longer enough,” Allison said. “Doing just the reporting and putting it on a website, well that doesn’t necessarily reach audiences.”
That experience has informed the distribution model Allison developed at The Continent, where readers have become an important part of how the publication reaches new audiences. Rather than relying solely on direct distribution, readers share the newspaper through their own networks, including WhatsApp groups, churches and family groups.
“The core challenge is not so much how we distribute our news but it’s how we grow a network of people who then take our news and distribute it into their own networks,” Allison said.
He said people are more likely to trust news shared by someone they know personally than information coming directly from a large and potentially faceless organisation.
That model now forms part of The Atlas, Coda’s new global publication produced in partnership with The Continent. The publication is modelled on The Continent’s format and distribution approach, but extends its geographical focus beyond Africa.
The Atlas covers global issues from a Global South and planetary perspective, focusing on subjects including AI, climate change, migration, war and democracy issues that increasingly cross national boundaries.
Extending networks
The publication is currently in its pilot phase. Five issues have been produced so far, with a subscriber base of several thousand readers, according to Allison. Coda is also exploring how the digital publication could eventually be produced in print.
The publication forms part of Coda’s broader experimentation with journalism that looks beyond the immediate news cycle. Allison said the organisation is also looking at how its existing monitoring system can be brought further into the public domain.
Under the system, each journalist on the Coda team is responsible for monitoring a geographic area against a specific set of criteria. Allison said the process has revealed stories, patterns and connections across geographies and industries.
“What we’re finding from that monitoring system is that it is throwing up all kinds of interesting stories and patterns and connections across geographies, across borders, across industries,” he said.
He described the work as functioning “as a kind of early warning system”, connecting developments that might otherwise not be connected.
Coda plans to expand this work through its Coda Currents newsletter, which Allison said will be revamped to reflect more of what the monitoring system is uncovering.
The leadership changes also see Coda’s founding editor Natalia Antelava move into the role of Publisher and CEO. Antelava, who co-founded Coda in 2016 and has led its journalism since then, will focus on the organisation’s institutional strategy, sustainability, major partnerships and the development of the ZEG Network.
The network extends Coda’s journalism into live, cross-disciplinary spaces designed to turn reporting into shared understanding, relationships and collaboration.
Allison’s appointment comes as Coda experiments with ways to respond to an information environment in which producing journalism is only one part of the challenge, with distribution, audience access and new forms of storytelling becoming increasingly important.
“We are going to be living in an era of some new and innovative and exciting journalism to meet this moment,” Allison said.
