Soltana Magazine: From a Young Team to Morocco’s Leading Women’s Website

At the end of 2015, I found myself facing a question I did not expect to answer so early in my career: who was going to lead this ship now?

Mohamed El Ghayssani had left to start his new project, Next Media, and suddenly I was there with Taoufik Bouachrine and a team of around twenty people: journalists, reporters, administrative staff, and technical people. For most of them, if not all, this was their first real professional experience. They had something very important: the desire to learn. They had a huge amount of energy, ambition, and willingness to work as much as needed. But I quickly understood that energy alone does not build an organisation. If you do not give energy a system, it can easily become chaos.

At that time, Soltana was not a big media brand trying to protect its position. It was still a young project trying to find a place in the market. Around us were media companies with famous names, old relationships, bigger budgets, and years of history. We had a young team, limited resources, limited experience, and relationships that were still being built. But we had something I did not fully understand the value of at the time: we were not afraid enough yet.

We were ready to contact anyone. We tried to enter any event we thought was important. We asked for interviews that maybe other people would hesitate to ask for. We asked direct questions because we did not have the luxury of thinking too much about how things were “normally” supposed to be done. When you start from zero, courage can sometimes be your only capital.

But after some time, I started to understand that my job was no longer only about editing a magazine. One morning I could be reviewing a headline with a journalist, one hour later looking at traffic numbers, then solving a problem inside the team, reviewing a commercial idea, speaking with someone we wanted to hire, and finally going back at night to a story or video that had to be published before the day ended.

I was doing almost everything.

I made decisions, trained people, followed their work, approved, rejected, hired, reviewed, tried to calm things down when the pressure became too high, and pushed harder when I felt the team was slowing down. I was not an editor-in-chief in the traditional meaning of the job. I was an editor-in-chief with the rank of firefighter, sometimes an HR manager, often a growth person, a product manager without knowing that this was what the role was called, an operations manager, and sometimes even a commercial negotiator when the business side and the editorial side met.

This was where I started learning something journalism had never really taught me: good content is not enough.

You can produce a very good story, but if nobody finds it, it will not live. You can also bring millions of visits, but if the project does not know what to do with that audience, those numbers remain only nice numbers on a screen. On the other side, if you allow the commercial team to decide everything that gets published, you may win a deal today and slowly lose the identity of the publication tomorrow.

That became part of my daily job. What does the reader want? What does Soltana need? What can we offer to advertisers without changing what the magazine is supposed to be? How can we stay close to people without becoming too superficial? How can we create light content without making empty content?

Traffic was always part of the discussion. On one side, Taoufik Bouachrine wanted bigger numbers, stronger presence, and a website that was growing quickly. On the other side, the commercial team needed something new to take to the market almost every day: a new idea, a different format, or a good reason for a brand to choose Soltana instead of another website.

The question was no longer only, “What are we publishing today?” It became: why would people click on it? Why would they share it? What does this story bring to the magazine? And how can an audience become real value for the business without destroying the editorial side?

I did not learn this conflict from a book. I lived it every day.

My days started very early. At around seven in the morning, I was usually the first person in the office. I liked that hour because it was the only moment when silence came before the chaos. I checked the numbers, reviewed what we had published the day before, looked at what worked and what did not, read the news, searched for possible stories, and tried to build the day in my head before everyone else arrived.

Around nine, the office started coming alive. Someone arrived with an idea, another person with a question, another one with a problem. Suddenly the day became one long chain of small things: a quick meeting that became a long discussion, a headline that needed to change, a call with a guest, breaking news, a video that needed to go online quickly, coordination with a photographer, a request from the commercial team, a problem with timing, a social media post to review, a journalist who needed guidance, and then back to the numbers again to see if all this work was actually taking us somewhere.

Many times, I would finally look up and realise that most of the office was already empty and it was close to midnight.

At that time, I did not think much about “work-life balance.” I was not asking myself if I was tired because being tired had simply become part of the routine. But I was learning at an incredible speed, probably much faster than I understood at the time.

I was learning how to take someone in their first professional experience and give them enough confidence to try, but also enough structure not to get lost. I was learning how to make a team with limited experience produce every day as if they had been doing it for years. I was learning how to build a culture where people did not feel they were simply employees completing tasks, but people responsible for the project itself.

I also learned that building a team is not just putting talented people in the same room. Sometimes the real challenge is taking people who are still at the beginning of their careers and creating a way of working that makes the group stronger than each individual person.

With time, what was happening inside the office started becoming visible outside.

[Unverified] Less than six months after I took the lead, Soltana had become one of the most visible names in women’s digital media in Morocco. Our position started changing. We were no longer always the ones trying to reach artists, designers, influencers, and people from the fashion world. The relationship started moving in both directions. Communication and PR agencies began making sure Soltana was invited to events, launches, conferences, and private meetings.

For me, this was one of the clearest signs that we had passed the stage of being “the new website trying to prove itself.” We did not need to explain who we were every time anymore, and our presence stopped looking unusual in places we had been fighting to enter only months earlier.

From the outside, maybe the story looked simple: a website growing, content spreading, famous names appearing on it, and traffic increasing. Inside the office, we knew the story was much less glamorous. It was made of dozens of small things repeated every day: someone learning how to do their first interview, a headline rewritten several times, an idea that did not work and had to be replaced, a journalist improving week after week, a number we checked every morning, a relationship slowly being built, and content we sometimes expected to perform well but failed, teaching us something new about our audience.

That is why I do not think what we achieved came from one brilliant idea or one lucky moment. It was accumulation. A team learning quickly, a system becoming clearer over time, enough courage to experiment, and almost an obsession with the small details.

Most importantly, Soltana did not teach me journalism. I already knew journalism before that. What I really learned there for the first time was management.

I learned that leadership is not about having all the answers. Sometimes it is simply about being the person who stays standing when the team does not know where to go next. I learned that a system is not a collection of procedures written in a document. It is a way to make twenty people move in the same direction, even when everything is happening quickly and the pressure is higher than it should be.

I also learned that when you are building something from zero, you have to stop thinking too much about the limits of your job title. The project does not care if the problem in front of you is included in your job description. The problem still needs to be solved.

Years later, when I look back at that period, I think Soltana was where the first real version of my professional identity started to appear.

At the time, I did not know I was learning how to build teams, turn chaos into systems, or connect content with product, growth, and business. I was simply trying to finish each day and come back the next morning to make the next one a little better.

But that was exactly what was happening.

It was there that I discovered something about myself. I feel strangely comfortable when I enter a project where the pieces are still not organised, where there is energy but no clear system, where there are good people but they need direction, and where the job is not only to complete the work but to build the machine that will keep completing it every day.

Maybe that was the most important thing I took from that period.

I did not only learn how to be an editor-in-chief.

I learned that I like building things.

And that the places where I can bring the most value are not always the ones that are already organised, but often the ones where everything is still scattered and someone has to start putting the pieces together.