Independent Journalism on the Pak-Afghan Border, Built From Nothing

The Pak-Afghan border region and the former FATA districts were, for years, some of the least-covered parts of Pakistan by national media. When outlets did cover them, it was usually through a security lens, written by reporters who'd never lived there.

Raza founded Tribal Post in March 2013 to report the region from inside it - civilian-run, not military-embedded, not parachuted in for a single story. That meant building a functioning newsroom in a place with almost no local journalism infrastructure to begin with.

Limited institutional support. A region where field access for journalists could shift overnight depending on the security situation. No large newsroom budget to draw on.

Raza built an editorial team of 5 reporters, 2 sub-editors, and 10+ field contributors, and treated training as core to the mission rather than a side project. Over the outlet's run, it trained 30+ young journalists from tribal communities, several of whom had no prior path into professional journalism.

One of very few civilian-run independent journalism platforms covering the Pak-Afghan border and former FATA. In 2017, the outlet won a competitive Internews Small Media Grant for a nine-month reporting project.

Twelve exclusive regional story packages on governance, human rights, and rule of law, plus a trained cohort of journalists from a region most outlets never invested in. Tribal Post was featured in The Nation in 2018 as an example of entrepreneurial journalism from the region.

I'd have formalized a succession plan for the outlet earlier. Tribal Post closed in 2019 partly because too much of its institutional memory sat with me personally rather than being distributed across the editorial team. A relaunch is planned, and this time the org structure comes first, not after.