NovaNews.co.za, the digital news platform of Novus Media, has been awarded Silver in the Best Emerging News Provider category at the WAN-IFRA 2026 African Digital Media Awards – one of the most prestigious recognitions in global journalism.
WAN-IFRA, the World Association of News Publishers, is the world’s largest international press organisation, representing 3,000 news publishing companies and 18,000 publications across 120 countries. Its African Digital Media Awards celebrate creativity, innovation, and initiatives that make a lasting impact in newsrooms and on audiences across the continent. The Best Emerging News Provider category specifically recognises independent news creators and early-stage organisations that demonstrate credibility, originality, and clear public value — particularly in underserved or low-trust information environments.
Launched in July 2025, following Novus Media’s acquisition of 21 community newspaper titles from Media24 in November 2024, NovaNews was built from scratch as a comprehensive hyperlocal digital news network. Its flagship umbrella site connects 21 individual community websites, transforming decades-old print publications into a thriving digital ecosystem – entirely without a paywall – while simultaneously delivering national and international news to its audience.
“This recognition validates our belief that community journalism can thrive in the digital age without compromising quality, independence, or accessibility,” said Bettie Giliomee-Rossouw, Novus Media’s Head of Digital and Editorial Commissioning. “We built NovaNews to inform, engage and empower local communities — and this award confirms we are doing exactly that.”
“What sets NovaNews apart is not simply that it publishes local news, but that it fundamentally re-engineers how news is discovered, contextualised, and monetised. The platform replaces the traditional section-based publisher model with a geography-led navigation system, built around a map-based content architecture that allows users to move seamlessly from international headlines to province-, town-, and community-level reporting within one connected ecosystem. Users can enter through a major headline and drill down to the places and communities most relevant to them, while advertisers can align messaging to progressively more precise geographic audiences – all within the same platform,” said Giliomee-Rossouw.
The platform was designed with clear objectives: to improve the discoverability of local stories, remove barriers to access through a free and registration-free model, increase movement across geographic layers and title sites, and give advertisers more precise local and regional targeting opportunities — proving a scalable commercial framework for community journalism without relying on subscriptions.
By combining multilingual publishing, location-led navigation, and a registration-free, ad-supported model, NovaNews serves a bilingual audience (Afrikaans and English) across its website network, Facebook (1 million+ followers), WhatsApp news channels, Instagram, TikTok, and email newsletters. Its sports vodcast, The Rugby Factory, has already surpassed 10,000 subscribers within just two months of launch, further demonstrating the platform’s remarkable audience reach and engagement.
“Our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proving that hyperlocal journalism and digital innovation are not mutually exclusive – they are powerfully complementary,” added Giliomee-Rossouw.
Visit novenews.co.za for more information.
