Briefly News Named Best Digital News Platform 2026 in South Africa at Global Business Awards
- Briefly News has taken Best Digital News Platform 2026 in South Africa at Corporate Vision’s Global Business Awards
- It is the newsroom’s second title from the same programme, after Most Innovative Digital News Platform in 2023
- The win closes a year that also brought WAN-IFRA Silver for EditorialEye, the newsroom’s own editorial tool
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Briefly News was named Best Digital News Platform 2026 in South Africa at the Global Business Awards, the newsroom's second title from the programme in three years.
Corporate Vision Magazine runs the programme, now in its sixth year, which spotlights organisations raising the bar in their industries. Briefly News first appeared on its winners’ list in October 2023, when it was named Most Innovative Digital News Platform.
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Much has changed since that 2023 win. The newsroom that once competed on speed and reach now competes on the tools it builds for itself, and those tools carried it well beyond South Africa this year.
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An In-House AI Tool Took the Newsroom Global
That reach was clearest in May, when WAN-IFRA awarded Briefly News Silver in the Best AI-Driven News Product, Format or Strategy category at its African Digital Media Awards. The entry was EditorialEye, an editorial assistant the newsroom built in-house.
EditorialEye had already taken Briefly News onto the global finalist list at the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Awards 2026, one of 278 finalists drawn from 811 entries across 78 countries. Few African newsrooms have entered that competition on the strength of their own technology.
The technology itself is deliberately modest in what it is allowed to do. EditorialEye reads a draft and checks grammar, structure, SEO and ethical risk, then hands every decision back to a human editor. It writes nothing that reaches the page.
What it does reach is the pace of the newsroom. Daily output has risen from 80 to 90 articles to between 150 and 200 since the rollout, and page views grew by 22% over the six months that followed.
Speed Was Never Allowed to Cost Accuracy
For Editor-in-Chief Maryn Blignaut, that pace only counts because nothing was surrendered to reach it.
“This title belongs to a team that refused to choose between speed and accuracy,” she said. “We built the tools that let us have both, and our readers have felt the difference.”
That balance is what the wider industry has been rewarding. Speaking at WAN-IFRA’s 77th World News Media Congress in Marseille, chief executive Stig Ørskov said the year’s strongest entries shared a refusal to let innovation cost them their readers’ trust.
A Decade of Building Toward This
Trust has run through the newsroom’s record for longer than the awards suggest. Briefly News was founded in 2014, later joined the UN Sustainable Development Goals Media Compact, and collected an African Excellence Award from MEA Markets in August 2024 for the second year running.
That record now stretches across four markets. Briefly News sits within Legit, the media group that also runs Legit.ng in Nigeria, TUKO.co.ke in Kenya and YEN.com.gh in Ghana.
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Source: Briefly News
