Daily Maverick triumphs at WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Africa 2025

Daily Maverick is proud to announce its recognition at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards Africa 2025, winning three of the continent’s top awards for excellence in digital journalism.

These accolades recognise not only our commitment to journalistic innovation, audience engagement, and reader revenue, but also celebrate the collaborative efforts of our journalists, editors, designers, and support teams who continuously push boundaries in service of the public good.

Awarded projects:

Best Newsletter – Elections ’24

Before South Africa’s pivotal 2024 national elections, Daily Maverick launched the Elections ’24 newsletter to equip voters with essential, accessible information. Each edition opened with a listicle summarising key insights, making it easy to digest. Readers were invited to submit questions and concerns, which the team addressed in later editions. With an open rate of 78.4% and subscriber growth nearly fivefold, Elections ’24 became Daily Maverick’s most successful newsletter to date.

Best Innovative Digital Project – Manifesto MAYHEM! (joint winner)

To make party manifestos accessible, engaging, and interactive before the national elections, Daily Maverick developed Manifesto Mayhem – a gamified deck of collectible cards, inspired by ’90s classics. Each card summarised a political party’s positions and linked to more detailed analysis on the Daily Maverick Elections Hub. Shared widely via WhatsApp, the project garnered positive feedback from across the political spectrum and encouraged deeper civic engagement. Judges commented: “It’s a great approach to break down and share candidates’ programmes in such a complex election.”

Best Subscription Initiative — The Daily Maverick Shutdown Project

Since 2019, Daily Maverick has operated on a donation-based revenue model – despite a growing readership, only 0.25% contribute financially as part of the Maverick Insider Membership programme. To draw urgent attention to this sustainability crisis, Daily Maverick took the radical step of shutting down for 24 hours – publishing no articles or updates across its platforms. The initiative resulted in a significant uptick in donations, new advertising interest, and increased support from existing subscribers.

The jury praised the campaign’s boldness and impact: “The campaign succeeded in its bid to grab attention, emphasise the value of the (publication’s) content to its readers, and boost short-term metrics significantly. Brilliant!” They added: “While it created an immediate surge in sign-ups and funding, the organisation has committed to maintaining this momentum long-term.”

Fran Beighton, head of Growth at Daily Maverick, reflected: “We are thrilled to have won the Best Subscription Initiative in Africa at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards. It feels particularly special as this was awarded for our Shutdown project. The Daily Maverick Shutdown was not something we did lightly, but it was a necessary effort to communicate the crisis facing journalism. We did it in the hope that it would sound the alarm so that we would never have to shut down again. A project of this magnitude cannot happen with only one team’s involvement. It requires the entire organisation to participate – and that’s exactly what happened. It was never intended to be a one-day stance but an always-on, ever-evolving project to highlight why public service journalism should be supported.”

From daily journalism to civic engagement tools, each of these award-winning projects reflects Daily Maverick’s mission to Defend Truth – not only through courageous reporting, but also through innovation, accessibility, and bold storytelling.

We are immensely proud to share these wins with our readers, donors, Maverick Insiders, and partners. Your continued belief in independent journalism makes this work possible.

To view the full list of winners, visit: https://wan-ifra.org/events/digital-media-awards-africa-2025.

This was first published on the Daily Maverick Blog.