Scoop News: Bilingual News Platform
A bilingual Arabic and French news platform for an independent Tunisian journalist, owned end to end: articles that translate and reach Facebook on their own, a social card studio wired to Make.com, and hosting that has served 1,000,000+ visitors for a few dollars a month.
- Started
- February 2026
- Timeline
- Ongoing since February 2026
- Complexity
- High
- Type
- Web App
Every screenshot shows the live public site at scoopnews.net. The three social cards are real output of the platform’s card studio.
Scoop News is a bilingual news site, in Arabic and French, run by an independent Tunisian journalist and live at scoopnews.net. It covers politics, the economy, the regions, culture, sport and world news, with an archive of more than 3,000 articles.
The journalist came with a clear editorial voice and no technical background. I took ownership of everything else: the product, the platform, the infrastructure and every technical decision, explained in plain language. The result is a newsroom where writing is the only job left. Translation, social distribution, images and hosting take care of themselves.
At a glance
- 1,000,000+ visitors served to date, with traffic that arrives in bursts whenever a story spreads on Facebook.
- Two editions, one newsroom: Arabic (right to left) and French (left to right), each with its own addresses, navigation and typography.
- Publish once: a new article is translated into French and posted to the official Facebook page automatically.
- A social card studio: branded images for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X, published through Make.com with the article link as the first comment.
- 3,000+ articles across 8 sections, with photo galleries, a video section, reader accounts and comments.
- A few cents to a few dollars a month to run, on top of the domain name.
The client and the brief
The client is a working journalist, not a technologist. They needed a site that looks and reads like a serious news outlet, publishes in the two languages Tunisian readers use, and reaches the audience where it already is, on Facebook, without adding manual work to every story.
Just as important was what they did not want: servers, dashboards, bills from several cloud providers, or words like “deployment” and “DNS”. The brief came down to one thing: let the journalist write.
End-to-end ownership
I acted as the journalist’s entire technical team, from the first conversation to day-to-day operations:
- Decisions in plain language. Every choice (what to automate, what a feature costs to run, what readers will see) was explained without jargon and decided together, so the journalist always knew what they were getting and why.
- All of the infrastructure. The domain, hosting, database, image delivery, automation accounts and the connection to the Facebook page are set up, watched and maintained on the journalist’s behalf.
- A back office built for one person. An Arabic editor where writing, choosing a photo and pressing publish is the whole workflow. Everything that follows is automatic.
- Continuous delivery. Improvements reach the live site on their own after every change, with no downtime and nothing for the client to do.
The reader experience
A front page that reads like a newspaper
The home page opens on a breaking-news ticker and a slider of top stories, then the latest articles, a section index and a block for each section. Every card shows the date, the view count and the comments, with a badge when the story carries a photo gallery or a video.
Each of the eight sections has its own cover and its own archive, so a reader can follow the economy or regional news the way they would turn to a page in print.
Articles built for reading and sharing
Article pages lead with the headline, a standfirst and the photo, followed by the story, a gallery that opens full screen, related stories and comments. Sharing to Facebook, X or WhatsApp is one tap, and every shared link unfurls as a branded preview: the article’s photo, cropped to the right size with the Scoop News logo in its corner, generated on the fly.
Readers can sign up with e-mail, Google or Facebook to comment and save articles, and a premium tier is available for subscriber-only stories.
Two languages, two directions
The French edition is a full mirror of the Arabic one, not a translated page bolted on. It has its own addresses, its own navigation, a left-to-right layout and its own typography. The language switch in the header takes a reader to the same story in the other language. Only articles with a complete French version appear in the French edition, so a French reader never lands on a half-translated page.
Built for phones
Most readers arrive from Facebook on a phone, so every page is designed for small screens first: a slide-out menu, sharing within thumb’s reach, and photos sized for the screen they land on.
Editorial automation
A journalist working alone cannot also be a translator, a social media assistant and a graphic designer, so the platform does those jobs.
Automatic French translation
When an article is created, its headline and standfirst are translated from Arabic into French in a single request to Google Cloud Translation. One click in the editor fills in the full French article, body included, for the journalist to review before it goes live. Sections and tags are translated the same way, so the French edition stays complete as the site grows.
Instant distribution to Facebook
The moment an article is published, the platform hands its headline and link to a Make.com scenario that posts it on the official Scoop News Facebook page. Each article is shared exactly once, whether it goes live straight away or is saved as a draft and published later.
Social card studio
For the stories that deserve more than a link, the studio turns an article into a ready-to-post image in seconds. The journalist picks an article, a template and a format, and the card is drawn with the article’s photo, section and headline, the logo and the site address.
- Four templates: a full-bleed photo, a split panel, a mosaic frame and a newspaper page, in the site’s own colours.
- Every platform’s sizes: square, portrait, story, link preview and widescreen, for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X.
- Arabic and French: the same article can be posted in either language, with the headline set right to left or left to right.
- One-click publishing through Make.com: the image goes to the CDN and then to a dedicated Make scenario, which posts it with its caption and adds the article link as the first comment. Captions are checked against each platform’s limits before anything is sent, and a double click never posts twice.
- History and drafts: every card sent is kept, and an unfinished card can be picked up later.
Built to scale on a small budget
News traffic is spiky. A quiet afternoon can turn into thousands of readers within minutes when a story is shared on Facebook. The platform is built to absorb those peaks at almost no standing cost, and has served more than one million visitors so far.
- Hosting that follows the audience. The site runs serverless on Google Cloud Run, which adds capacity within seconds when traffic rises and scales back down when it falls, so the budget pays for readers, not for idle servers.
- A cache in front of the database. Front pages, sections and listings are held in memory for a minute at a time, and simultaneous requests for the same page are answered by a single database query. A rush of readers on one story costs about as much as one reader.
- Lean data access. Listing pages read only the fields they display, every list has a fixed size, independent queries run in parallel, and the database indexes match each query the site makes.
- Images from a CDN, at the right size. Photos are stored on Cloudinary and delivered resized and compressed for each slot and each screen, in modern formats.
- Reading costs no writes. Visitors who are not signed in create no session and trigger no database writes.
- Long-lived static files. Stylesheets, scripts and images are cached by the browser for a week and refreshed automatically with every release.
The result stays fast under load and costs between a few cents and a few dollars a month to run, on top of the domain name.
Scope
The engagement covered the product, the platform, its automation and its day-to-day operation. Two areas were outside the contract: search engine optimisation (setup and strategy), and social media management, including the growth and marketing of the Facebook page. The platform feeds those channels; the strategy behind them was not part of this work.
Tech stack
- Backend: Node.js, Express, MongoDB with Mongoose, server-rendered EJS.
- Frontend: Tailwind CSS with FlyonUI, Sass, Swiper and GLightbox, with right-to-left and left-to-right layouts from one codebase.
- Languages: i18next for the interface, per-article French versions, Google Cloud Translation.
- Automation: Make.com scenarios for Facebook posting and the social card studio, HTML canvas for drawing the cards.
- Media: Cloudinary for storage, on-the-fly resizing and branded link previews.
- Accounts and payments: Passport (e-mail, Google and Facebook sign-in) and Konnect for Tunisian online payments.
- Hosting: Google Cloud Run with continuous deployment from Cloud Build, and MongoDB Atlas.
- Safety: Joi validation, HTML sanitisation and rate limiting.
Outcome
Scoop News gives an independent journalist the reach of a much larger newsroom. The journalist writes; the platform translates, publishes, distributes and scales, and it has carried more than a million visitors without the journalist ever having to think about a server. The technical side is handled completely, which keeps the journalist’s time where it belongs: on the reporting.