The Meridian ingests reporting from eighteen Southern African and international outlets, extracts the underlying facts, and publishes a single neutral synthesis of each major story - with per-fact citations back to the sources that reported each claim.

Every article gets three scores: neutrality (0–100), fact density, and political drift (−1 to +1). Every ongoing story is represented as a linked timeline of captioned moments. The scoring and synthesis pipeline is transparent and open - if you can read TypeScript and SQL, you can audit exactly how any number was produced.

Why we exist

Southern Africa has no shortage of quality journalism. It has a shortage of aggregation. A reader following the GNU, load-shedding, or the Gauteng water crisis has to visit four outlets, reconcile contradictions, and figure out what was said versus what was agreed. The Meridian automates that reconciliation.

What we are not

We are not a news organisation in the traditional sense - we employ no journalists and write no original reporting. We are an aggregation and synthesis layer on top of existing journalism. Every synthesis links to its source articles. If a source has a paywall, we link to it anyway - the citation is the receipt.

We have no opinion section. We have no advertising. We have no comments. The pipeline is the editorial desk.

Afrikaans, isiZulu, isiXhosa

Maroela Media, Netwerk24, Rapport, Isolezwe and Ilanga are indexed from day one. Source quotes in non-English languages are preserved in the synthesis with the original language tag. Phase 5 introduces per-language synthesis at /af/, /zu/, /xh/.

Contact

For corrections: use the corrections form. For everything else: hello@meridian.news.

Privacy

We collect email addresses for the newsletter only. We don't sell, share or rent your data. The unsubscribe link in every email is one click and permanent. Article access is free, no login required, no tracking cookies.

Terms

Synthesis text is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source article titles and URLs are reproduced for attribution only; copyright in the original articles remains with their publishers. If you believe we have exceeded fair use, contact us.