An Urdu-first newsroom, publishing its own daily e-paper around the clock.

Daily Azadi is an established Urdu newspaper — the voice of independent journalism in Quetta. Print was their craft; the web was the gap. Their stories deserved a digital home, but Urdu publishing on the web is genuinely hard: right-to-left layout, Nastaliq-style typography that most platforms butcher, and an editorial team that needed to publish breaking news without calling a developer.

The paper also needed its daily print edition online — a proper e-paper their readers could open every morning, published by the newsroom itself.

We built RTL-first, not RTL-adapted. Instead of taking a left-to-right template and flipping it, the layout system, typography scale, and reading flow were designed for Urdu from the first wireframe — then tested with the people who'd actually read it.

The second principle: the newsroom owns the site. Every workflow — publishing a story, uploading the morning e-paper, pinning breaking news — was designed to be done by an editor on deadline, not a developer on call. We shadowed how the team actually works and shaped the CMS around it.

“Codified delivered a fast, Urdu-first portal and a daily e-paper we publish ourselves. They respected how a newsroom actually works.”

A news portal designed RTL-first: Urdu typography rendered properly at every screen size, category-driven sections for latest news, columns, and editorials, and article pages built for fast reading on the mobile networks most readers are on.

The editorial workflow is the core of the build. Journalists publish stories, attach media, and push breaking news themselves — no developer in the loop. The daily e-paper module lets the team upload each morning's edition so print readers get the full paper digitally, every day.

The portal serves thousands of readers daily and stays fast under traffic spikes, with the newsroom running the entire operation on its own.

An Urdu newspaper now publishes digitally every single day — stories and the full e-paper — without a developer in the loop. Readers across Balochistan and the diaspora get the paper the morning it prints, and the newsroom gained a distribution channel that costs them nothing to operate.