Running Bilingual Digital Operations for a Regional News Platform

Tribal News Network (TNN) covers Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the former FATA districts in both Pashto and English, serving an audience split across two languages and, often, two very different levels of digital access.

By 2017, TNN needed its digital operations run by someone who understood both sides of that split, not just the technical publishing side but the editorial judgment of what needed to run in which language and when.

Bilingual operations mean everything gets built twice, or built once with real thought put into how it works in both languages. A small web editing team had to cover both the volume of daily news and the technical maintenance of the platforms themselves.

Raza managed digital operations end to end: supervising and training a 5-person web editing team, redesigning the news platforms, and implementing SEO and performance work so the sites actually reached readers searching in both languages, not just the ones who already knew the outlet existed.

Redesigned news platforms with real SEO and performance groundwork, running bilingual English and Urdu operations across a four-year tenure.

A stable digital operation and a trained editing team that could run day-to-day publishing without needing every decision routed through one person, which is the actual test of whether digital infrastructure work succeeded.

I'd have pushed harder, earlier, for a documented style and technical guide specific to the bilingual workflow. Some of what the team learned stayed as informal, verbal knowledge, which made onboarding new editors slower than it needed to be.