Daily Maverick

Crosswire lists Daily Maverick as Center within South Africa's media spectrum — the grouping it uses both for genuinely centrist titles and for outlets the major media-bias assessments do not place consistently on one side. In South Africa, Mail & Guardian is listed as Left-leaning — so you can open Daily Maverick beside a title of a different orientation and compare the same day's front pages directly.

Read Daily Maverick beside another title from South Africa and the differences show up fastest in what leads the page. Digital-native outlets reorder their front pages continuously in response to reader behaviour, so Daily Maverick may look different an hour from now — reload it alongside a print-cycle title and you can see which stories have staying power and which are traffic spikes. Because Daily Maverick is listed near the centre, it works best as the fixed point in a comparison — put a left- and a right-leaning title from South Africa either side of it and the direction each one pulls becomes measurable rather than impressionistic.

This is an approximate orientation, not a definitive judgement — and not a rating of quality or accuracy. Read how Crosswire classifies editorial leanings, including the sources behind each label. Directory last reviewed 2026-08-31. Think this label is wrong? Suggest a correction.

Daily Maverick was founded in 2009 and is published from Johannesburg. It is one of 6 outlets tracked in South Africa and the only digital-native outlet tracked there. By outlets tracked, South Africa ranks first of the 45 countries on Crosswire's Africa hub, which lists 178 outlets in all.

Across Africa, Crosswire tracks 64 of the 191 digital-native outlets in the directory. The nearest counterparts to Daily Maverick outside South Africa, starting with Southern Africa, are Mwebantu (Zambia), New Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe), Premium Times (Nigeria) and Pulse Ghana (Ghana). Opening one of them beside Daily Maverick is the quickest way to see what is a house style and what is a national one.