Burkina Faso news, front pages compared
Crosswire tracks 4 major Burkina Faso news outlets. Preview their homepages side by side below — switch between two, three and four columns, go compact, or translate every page into your language.
The Burkina Faso media landscape on Crosswire
Crosswire lays Burkina Faso's front pages next to one another so you can see which stories lead where, how headlines are framed, and what one outlet foregrounds that another leaves out. All 4 titles tracked in Burkina Faso sit near the editorial centre in our classification, which is common where the press is dominated by public broadcasters and agencies, or where no confident left/right rating was available. Comparison here is less about political line than about which stories each newsroom judges worth the top of the page.
By kind of outlet, the 4 titles break down as 2 daily newspapers (Sidwaya and Le Pays), 1 digital-native outlet (Burkina24) and 1 news portal (Lefaso.net). Crosswire lists no public-service broadcaster for Burkina Faso, so the fixed point in a comparison has to be a wire service or the most widely read daily instead.
Burkina Faso sits in West Africa, on Crosswire's Africa hub. By outlets tracked it is 5th of the 15 countries in West Africa and 12th of the 45 across Africa, where the average is 4 outlets per country. Its neighbours in West Africa with hubs of their own are Nigeria (5), Ghana (5), Senegal (4), Côte d'Ivoire (4), Niger (4), Guinea (4), Gambia (4), Togo (4), Benin (4), Cape Verde (4), Mauritania (4), Mali (3), Sierra Leone (3) and Liberia (3).
Leaning groupings are approximate guides drawn from widely cited media-bias assessments — see the methodology and what the labels can and can't tell you. Counts are taken from the directory as of .
Which are Burkina Faso's main news outlets?
Across Burkina Faso's editorial spectrum, Crosswire currently lists near the center, Sidwaya, Lefaso.net, Le Pays and Burkina24. Each outlet below links to a full profile — its facts, editorial leaning and a live front-page preview — and the comparison view above shows any of them side by side.
Sidwaya is Burkina Faso's state-owned daily newspaper, created in 1984 and published in Ouagadougou by Éditions Sidwaya, a public company. Billing itself as the daily of all Burkinabè, it is the government's paper of record, covering official activity, national politics, regional news from across the country, the economy, culture and sport in print and online.
Lefaso.net is Burkina Faso's leading online news portal, founded in 2003 and based in Ouagadougou. Independent and widely used as a reference source, it publishes news, interviews, analysis and reader debate on Burkinabè politics, security, the economy and society, and hosts communiqués and opinion pieces that make it a central hub of the country's public conversation.
Le Pays is a private daily newspaper published in Ouagadougou since 1991 by Éditions Le Pays. One of Burkina Faso's established independent dailies, it covers national politics, security, regional news, the economy and society, with editorials and readers' pages, and maintains an online edition carrying the paper's daily output between print runs.
Burkina24 is a digital-native news outlet founded in 2011 and based in Ouagadougou. Publishing around the clock, it covers Burkinabè politics, security, business, culture and sport with text and video, and has grown into one of the country's most-visited online news sources, particularly among younger readers and the Burkinabè diaspora.
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Reading the news critically
The vocabulary and the method behind these comparisons.