How I Run a Small Newsroom in Nepal

Starting a news website is the fun part. Running one is the part nobody writes about.

I ran Scriling News for years. We started from nothing, grew to 50,000 rupees a month in early 2021, and at our peak hit $13,000 a month, all from advertising. I have already written the playbook for starting a news website in Nepal. This is the other half: the operating manual. The unglamorous daily work of keeping a small newsroom alive in Nepal.

The editor’s real job is saying no

People think running a newsroom means chasing stories. It does not. It means deciding what not to publish.

Every day, a dozen things happen that could be news. A politician says something. A road gets blocked. A rumor spreads on social media. If you publish all of it, you become noise. If you publish none of it, you become irrelevant. The editor’s job is the line between the two.

I learned to ask three questions before anything went live. Is it true, or at least verified by someone I trust? Does our reader need to know this today? And can we add anything, even one line of context, that the reader would not get from a social media post? If the answer to all three was yes, it went up. If not, it waited.

This discipline is what separates a newsroom from a feed. A feed publishes everything. A newsroom publishes on purpose. Readers can feel the difference even if they cannot name it. They come back to the place that respects their time.

Hire for reliability, not brilliance

When I needed writers, I did not look for the best writers in Nepal. I looked for the most reliable ones.

Brilliant writers who file once a month are useless to a daily newsroom. Average writers who file clean copy every single day are gold. News is a volume business with a quality floor. You need people who show up.

I found writers in the usual places: university students, freelancers, young journalists who wanted clips. The interview was simple. I gave them a real story and a deadline of a few hours. The ones who filed on time, with the facts straight and the spelling mostly right, got the work. The ones who wrote beautifully but missed the deadline did not.

Then I did the most important thing: I paid on time, every time. This sounds basic. In Nepal’s media world, it is not. Writers here are used to chasing payments for months. I wrote a whole essay about why getting paid is the hardest part of building in Nepal, and the lesson cuts both ways. If you want reliable people, be a reliable payer. The day your writers start wondering whether the money will come is the day your newsroom starts dying.

Pay people before you pay for anything else. Hosting can wait a week. Salaries cannot.

Build the machine: rhythm, templates, checklists

A newsroom runs on rhythm, not motivation. Motivation is what you feel on launch day. Rhythm is what files the story on a rainy Tuesday when nobody feels like working.

Our rhythm was simple. Morning: scan what happened overnight, assign the day’s stories. Midday: first drafts in. Afternoon: edit, publish, promote. Evening: plan tomorrow. The same shape every day. Boring is the point. Boring means it works without me pushing it.

Templates did the heavy lifting. Every article type had one: breaking news, explainer, interview, list. A new writer could open the template and know exactly what the story needed: headline style, first paragraph structure, where the source link goes, how the ending works. Templates are how you get consistent quality from inconsistent humans.

Checklists caught what templates missed. Before publishing: headline checked, facts verified, source credited, image attached, category set, slug cleaned. I once automated parts of this pipeline and learned that the checklist matters more than the automation. A machine can draft. Only a human decides it is right.

Write everything down. The moment a process lives only in your head, you become the bottleneck. The moment it is written down, anyone can run it, including future you on a bad day.

Keep the money boring

Here is the financial truth of a small Nepali newsroom. Revenue is exciting and costs should be boring.

Our revenue at peak was $13,000 a month, all advertising. That number sounds great until you learn it was not every month. Ad revenue moves with traffic, traffic moves with the news cycle, and the news cycle does not care about your payroll. Some months were half that. You plan for the bad months, not the good ones.

So costs stayed boring. WordPress on decent hosting. Caching. That was the whole tech stack. No custom CMS, no app, no video studio. Every rupee of complexity is a rupee that needs revenue to feed it. I kept a rule: if a cost does not directly produce stories or revenue, it dies.

The only cost I never cut was people. Writers, then hosting, then everything else. In that order. A newsroom is people who write things. Everything else is decoration.

And I kept a reserve. Three months of costs sitting untouched. When ad payments were late, and they were always late, the reserve meant nobody panicked. Panic is what makes founders sell the company cheap or take bad deals. A reserve buys you calm, and calm is a business strategy.

Treat traffic like weather

Traffic is weather. Some days it rains readers. Some days it does not. You cannot control it, so you build for all of it.

Our traffic came from two places: search engines and social media. Both are rented land. I have written about this more times than I can count, because it is the single most important lesson of my career. The algorithm gives and the algorithm takes away. When it changed, our numbers changed, and there was nothing to do except adapt.

So while the traffic was good, I should have built the email list from post one. I did not, and I regret it. An email list is the only audience you own. Social followers belong to the platform. Search visitors belong to Google. Email subscribers belong to you. If I could run Scriling again, the signup box would go up on day one, before the logo was even finished.

The practical version of this lesson: never let one source pass sixty percent of your traffic. When search was carrying us, I pushed social. When social carried us, I pushed search. Diversification is not a finance concept. It is a survival concept.

Know what the newsroom is for

Every newsroom needs an answer to one question: why does this exist? Not the mission statement version. The real version.

Ours was simple: give Nepali readers fast, honest news in plain language. Every decision filtered through that. A story that was fast but sloppy failed the test. A story that was honest but three days late failed the test. The purpose was the quality control.

And here is the harder part: know when the purpose is served and it is time to stop. Newsrooms, like products, have lifecycles. I have shut down more products than most people have started, and each one taught me the same thing. The skill is not just building. It is knowing when the building is done.

Scriling taught me everything I know about publishing, audiences, revenue, and teams. Those lessons now run through everything I build, including Niguro. The newsroom was never just a newsroom. It was my education, and it paid for itself many times over.

The operating checklist

If you are running a small newsroom, or thinking about it, here is the whole manual on one list.

1. Decide what you will not publish, and write it down.

2. Hire for reliability. Test with a real deadline, not an interview.

3. Pay people on time, every time, before anything else.

4. Fix the daily rhythm and protect it. Boring means it works.

5. Template every article type. Checklist every publish.

6. Keep costs boring. Cut everything that does not produce stories or revenue.

7. Hold three months of costs in reserve. Calm is a strategy.

8. Never let one traffic source pass sixty percent.

9. Build the email list from post one. The audience you own is the only one that counts.

10. Write down why the newsroom exists, and check every big decision against it.

None of this is complicated. That is the point. Running a newsroom is not about brilliance. It is about doing simple things reliably, every day, for years. The founders who last are not the smartest ones. They are the ones who show up on the rainy Tuesdays.