Legit.ng, Nigeria’s most visited news website with over 10 million monthly readers (Alexa ranking), has been declared as the Best News Website or Mobile Service at the 2021 Africa Digital Media Awards.
The company’s in-house engineering team developed a mobile app that allows their readers to download news automatically while they are in WiFi zones.
Pulse, Nigeria also emerged as the Best in Audience Engagement for “Innovative content delivery for TikTok”. The digestible creation of content and cross-posting to Instagram and Facebook across a wide range of topics and industries won this award for Pulse.
The annual African Digital Media Awards are the most prestigious digital news awards on the African continent, presented by WAN-IFRA, World Association of News Publishers.
The Awards which recognises news publishers who have delivered unique and original digital media projects in the last 12 months are presented annually as part of a series of regional competitions held in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, and South Asia.
Responding to winning the award, Legit.ng’s Editor-in-chief, Akinyemi Akinrujomu said his company was extremely honoured to receive such an important award as the Best News Website in Africa and was sincerely grateful for the recognition the team got for their hard work.
” While I acknowledge that every other nominee for this award was as capable of winning it too, Legit.ng’s victory is duly deserved. I congratulate all editorial team members and other staff members who made this possible. Legit.ng will keep leading the way,” Akinrujomu said.
Winners of other categories of the awards are as followers;
Best Paid Content Strategy: News24 for subscribers and Maverick Insider.
After 20+ years of publishing content for free, News24 launched a freemium paywall in August 2020. This converted 4% of its registered users to digital just months later. Maverick Insider is the membership community for Daily Maverick with the cause of keeping Daily Maverick free for all.
Best Project for News Literacy: The Wrap, explain.co.za, South Africa. The ethos of The Wrap is to create content that is accessible to all users – whether it be in audio, text, PDF, or Whatsapp message.
Best Digital Marketing Campaign for a News Brand: Media 24 for Volksblad: Converting print readers to digital” and Standard Group PLC (Kenya) for “Project Eagle”. Volksblad is the effort Media24 went through to get their print readers converted to digital, while Project Eagle surrounded the launch of Standard Group’s paid-for digital content strategy.
Best Use of Online Video: For the love of the land by Food for Mzansi, South Africa.A 10-part documentary about the journeys of mostly black farmers across South Africa, this series aimed to let storytelling give an accurate representation of what farmers in South Africa go through every day – and the way they give hope to their communities.
Best Data Visualisation: “The Architecture of Apartheid”, African Drone, South Africa. This project focused on the unique architecture of hostels constructed during the Apartheid era, initially built to house black labourers near mining towns. Africa Drone put together a visualisation of all the hostels still in South Africa, and begs the question – what do we do about them?
Best Native Advertising / Branded Content Campaign: “See the bigger picture”. The project aimed to show the correlation between news stories and broader-scale businesses. Each piece took a journalistic approach that created a commercial impact for the client in question.
Best Trust initiative: Maverick Citizen for Covid-19 mis/disinformation. Maverick Citizen gave their readers access to a wide range of information about Covid-19 from professionals, through interviews that spoke about vaccines, misinformation, and deepfake news.
Achievements recorded by Legit.ng
Since its establishment in 2012, Legit.ng says it has provided Nigerians with a digital news platform that was updated in real-time with breaking news. To cater to the demand of being Africa’s most mobile-centric country, it has now evolved into the largest online publisher in Nigeria (according to Alexa rank).
“Nigeria’s most visited news website boasts of 10M+ monthly users generating 50M pageviews on the site. Their hands-on response to the country’s slow download time was a challenge worth accepting as our in-house engineering team developed a mobile (data saving) app enabling their readers to download news automatically while in Wi-Fi zones.
“The app now has over 5M installations. The agility and design of the app were some of the key factors that influenced the decision-making process for the jury members when naming Legit.ng as the Best News Website at the 2021 Africa Digital Media Awards.”
For more information, visit WAN-IFRA website.
