The Daily Talk: Monrovia's Blackboard Newspaper Is Still Standing
The Daily Talk chalkboard in Monrovia (file photo, December 2005). Photo: Chris Guillebeau, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For 25 years, a hand-painted blackboard on Tubman Boulevard has served as one of Monrovia's most trusted news sources — no electricity, no login, no paywall.
On Tubman Boulevard in central Monrovia stands a wooden kiosk topped by a large, hand-painted blackboard. Every day, it carries the news: written in Liberian English, updated by hand, and read for free by anyone who walks past. It is called The Daily Talk, and it has been doing this since May 2000.
Its creator, Alfred J. Sirleaf, built the board to reach Liberians who could not afford a newspaper, a radio, or the electricity to charge a phone. To get around low literacy, he developed his own visual shorthand — a dirty water bottle to signal rising fuel prices, colour-coding for good and bad news — and gathers information from internet cafés and a network of roughly 200 volunteers around the country. The New York Times once called it "the most widely read report" in the capital.
The board has not had an easy run. Government soldiers destroyed it after Sirleaf's reporting angered then-president Charles Taylor, forcing him into exile before he returned in 2005 to rebuild it ahead of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's election. In 2018, a vehicle collision damaged the structure again; USAID and Internews stepped in to help fund its reconstruction.
A quarter-century on, The Daily Talk still runs as one man's solo operation, kept alive by small donations of taxi fare and phone credit rather than any advertising budget or media company behind it — a low-tech counterpoint to the smartphone-and-social-media news habits spreading through the same city today.