How Daily Maverick built a data-driven newsroom with up to 200 dashboards and 20+ newsletter trackers

Daily Maverick is one of Africa's most influential independent newsrooms, publishing investigations, analysis, and opinion for a global audience of over ten million monthly visitors. The outlet runs more than 20 newsletters through Sailthru and Whitebeard, operates a membership program with over 32,000 supporters, sells sponsored content to major South African advertisers, and manages programmatic ad operations through Google Ad Manager.

A newsroom this large generates an enormous amount of data across many systems. Article performance lives in GA4. Newsletter metrics live in Sailthru and Whitebeard. Social performance lives in native platform dashboards. Ad delivery lives in GAM. Sponsored content campaigns span all of the above. And editorial leadership needs to see how each section, each journalist, and each topic is performing, often in real time.

The challenge wasn't a lack of data. It was that no single tool could connect articles to pageviews to newsletter opens to social shares to ad revenue, and let every team in the building ask their own questions without filing a request with the data team.

Per-section editorial dashboards

Every editorial section at Daily Maverick has its own dedicated dashboard: Business Maverick, Our Burning Planet, Maverick Citizen, Sport, Newsdeck, Maverick Life, Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay. Each dashboard tracks articles published, GA4 pageviews, active users, session duration, and engagement, broken down by author, topic, and time period. Editors see how their section is performing without waiting for a weekly report.

Newsletter analytics at scale

Daily Maverick publishes more than 20 newsletters: First Thing, Business Maverick, Afternoon Thing, Crypto Corner, After The Bell, Democracy, Maverick Sport, Money Cents, Baywatch, and more. Each newsletter has its own dashboard tracking open rate, click-to-open rate, unique opens, and subscriber trends. The marketing team uses a separate "Newsletter Ads Performance" dashboard to track ad placements inside newsletters and report to sponsors.

Sponsored content reporting

Daily Maverick runs up to 1,000 active advertiser campaigns for clients across financial services, telecom, retail, automotive, education, hospitality, FMCG, and legal: Discovery, MTN, Samsung, Lexus, Woolworths, SAB, GIBS, Wits University, ENSafrica, The Vineyard, IDC, Investec, Alexforbes, Binance, and more. Every campaign report shows the actual sponsored articles and social posts alongside GA4 pageviews, engagement metrics, and newsletter performance. The sponsored content team has individual performance dashboards per team member, plus a team-wide view, so management can track output and quality.

Topic and event deep-dives

When a major story breaks or an event runs, Daily Maverick spins up a dedicated dashboard. The Crypto Data Dashboard tracks every crypto article with 25 dashboard cards. The Gaza dashboard, G20 dashboard, Rugby dashboard, and Provincial Rugby dashboard each give journalists and editors a real-time view of coverage depth, audience engagement, and content performance for that specific beat.

Daily Maverick runs up to 200 live dashboards with up to 2,000 cards. Every editorial section, every newsletter, every sponsored content team member, and every major topic has its own analytics view. The newsroom has gone from "ask the data team and wait" to "check your dashboard." Campaign reports go out to 300+ advertisers with the actual articles and placements visible alongside the performance data.