Tags containing: "content management"

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How the right CMS can accelerate digital transformation for publishers

June 21, 2022 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Digital news consumption is a daily habit for most consumers. But they have high expectations. Audiences want news to be timely and offer easily discoverable news content.

An underperforming website infrastructure can be a crucial barrier for publishers. In moving toward digital transformation, publishers must upgrade their:

User experience,
Ease of discovery of news and information of interest, and
Mobile optimization of both content and advertising.

The Knight Foundation worked with a small group of Black-owned local media outlets to upgrade their publishing solutions to serve underrepresented communities. Members of this group faced challenges, from aging technology to legacy website standards. The five organizations participating in this lab include The Atlanta Voice, The Dallas Weekly, New York Amsterdam News, Houston Defender Network, and The Washington Informer.

While participating in the lab, Atlanta Voice, the Amsterdam News, Houston Defender Network, and The Washington Informer upgraded their content management systems. The Knight Foundation provided grants and guidance for necessary transition and monitored the process. Their report, Digital content platform upgrades for small media outlets, highlights the publishers’ experience and key ﬁndings to assist other small publishers in the process.

Participating Publishers:

Atlanta Voice is the largest audited African American community newspaper in Georgia, with more than 600 print newspaper locations in the Atlanta metro area.
Amsterdam News is one of the country’s oldest published African American newspapers and a leading voice of the black community in the New York region.
Defender, also known as the Houston Defender, is Houston’s leading Black news source and offers breaking news, lifestyle, politics, commentary, and community newsletters.
The Washington Informer is a multimedia news organization that serves the information needs of the African American community in the metropolitan Washington D.C. area.

Determine the right content management system

A content management system (CMS) or platform is what houses the content that publishers produce to serve website visitors. CMS platforms need to quickly load content on browsers across device types, including desktop, tablet, and mobile phones.

After a careful review, the publishers in the study decided on Newspack as their WordPress CMS. Its design targets small and medium-sized digital news organizations specifically. The move to Newspack helped provide the publishers with:

A clean database of imported content.
A better control of story display.
Additional improvements to position a well-performing website.

While transitioning to a new CMS can be challenging and requires technical expertise, Newspack onboarding included support tech and importing all the archived content.

While a CMS is one of the most expensive investments in the digital transformation process, it includes a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This helps to reduce the need for additional capital investments. The SaaS model eliminates depreciating hardware like web or database servers.

Beyond the technicalities of transformation

It’s crucial for all stakeholders – including senior management and newsroom staff – to be at the core of a publisher’s digital transformation. Teams need to learn a new process for sharing information, often repositioning themselves. A successful transition means aligning internal teams with your service providers to work together.

Staff development is also critical. An essential function in a digital news organization is that of a web producer. It is necessary to have someone on the team who can produce, edit, and post the digital-ﬁrst news content. Other positions need to evolve as well and fill gaps in old practices that are now online. Publishers needed to think long-term and strategically and not look to ﬁll full-time or part-time roles with outside contractors.

Digital transformation is continuous and the transition to a new CMS is a serious commitment, especially for a small publisher with limited resources. Publishers willing to learn new practices and formulate new workflows will run more efficiently and effectively. The results of this transition link to an engaged audience and more advertising and reader revenue.

Innovation | Perspectives

How publisher operating systems will help save the business

August 13, 2019 Dennis Yuscavitch, VP of Product Marketing—Outbrain

It’s a brutal time to be in the news publishing business. One troubling example is that, between 2004 and 2018, more than one in five American newspapers folded. However, I believe that publishing can be saved, and that one promising new technology may play a leading role in bringing publishing back: the publisher operating system.

To help explain what the publisher operating system is and why it’s so crucial, let’s back up to understand what’s driven the current struggles and decline. It’s a story of a centuries-old industry upended by technology. It is also one that I believe technology can fix.

Discovery

The publishing business is a discovery business, and it always has been. For centuries, readers have flocked to sources like newspapers and magazines to learn new things, understand their world—and, of course, to find new ideas to entertain and delight them.

For most of publishing history, much of that discovery business was dominated by a handful of regional newspapers and magazines. Whether they covered a small neighborhood, a city, or an entire state—the logic was the same. The publications hired journalists and editors to create content for discovery-hungry audiences. At the same time, they invested in operations and technology, like ad sales teams, printing presses and other infrastructure, to fund the business and distribute their information.

Of course, creating and distributing all that content presented heavy fixed costs—which raised the barriers to entry in a given media market. The high cost of doing business gave most publishers monopolies (or sometimes duopolies or triopolies) in their respective markets. Readers had one or two publications they loyally subscribed to and read—and through which advertisers could reach them. All of this served to fund the journalists and editors who kept readers engaged and informed.

Disruption

The internet changed all of this. Now, between push-button publishing and programmatic advertising, readers, even those in local markets, have a vast array of outlets to choose from to discover new content. As a result, advertisers have an endlessly-expanding number of outlets through which to reach those audiences. And regional publishers are getting squeezed out of the equation. Close to 200 American counties lacked a local paper in 2018. That’s not just bad news for publishing businesses. Ultimately, it hurts journalism and communities.

Not that struggling publishers are taking the changes sitting down. Instead, they’re pursuing lean, efficient operations in a vastly more competitive era. They’re in a constant battle to recapture the ad revenues and readership they’ve lost, and to cut down heavily on fixed costs. To keep those costs down, many publishers have been forced to downsize content teams. They lay off journalists and editors while trying to diversify their revenue stream away from advertising into ecommerce, subscriptions, memberships, and experiential events.

In the short term, investing less on the content side may be many publishers’ only choice. However, this approach also means de-funding the very content that draws audiences and justifies higher ad prices. In other words, many publishers are caught in a vicious cycle: commoditization forces them to slash the very assets that set them apart.

Managing content and costs

That’s the state of much of the publishing industry today. It’s a situation that cries out for a tech solution. Rather than cutting editorial teams, publishers ought to be able to streamline operations and maximize efficiency. And this is an objective that software and automation ought to be able to meet.

Unfortunately, software solutions have been hard to come by. Outside of content management systems, meaningful offerings are few and far between. Instead, publishers have been forced to struggle with disjointed tech stacks on the advertising side of the house, and dismal offerings for managing subscription businesses. They’re left to support costly IT integrations across systems—and resource-heavy manual labor when systems don’t integrate. That’s hardly promising for a struggling industry that critically needs efficiency gains.

Introducing the publisher operating system

Recently, however, things have changed. In 2016, the Washington Post brought its in-house publisher solution, Arc, to market. Last summer, Vox Media introduced its own in-house publisher platform, Chorus, as well. More than just piecemeal offerings, these are true end-to-end solutions. They help publishers manage the full range of news publishing operations—from ad sales, including a built-in ad network; to subscriptions; to content management; to community management. In other words, they’re full operating systems for publisher’s businesses.

An end-to-end solution is exactly what it will take to give publishers the efficiency they need. And judging from their success in the market, these OS’s have clearly struck a chord. “Combined,” Digiday reports that “the two platforms reach nearly 1 billion unique users every month across more than a dozen countries around the world.”

Given the success of the two leading players, it wouldn’t be surprising to see other market entrants as well, and the birth of a full-fledged publisher OS sector. That’s good for local news businesses, and local news. The increased efficiency from OS’s are likely to free news organizations to focus less on business operations, and more on editorial content and journalism. For the struggling regional news business, that’s good news indeed.

Internet technologies have forced the news publishing industry into a tailspin. I believe this new technology—the publisher OS—will help publishers right the course again.

Media tech bosses talk innovation, disruption, and delivering great experiences

April 4, 2019 Erik Martin—Independent Journalist

Media businesses today juggle a lot of C-suite acronyms. When it comes to tech-related execs, there are established staples like the chief information officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO). However, in recent years we’ve seen the emergence of the chief digital officer and chief data officer—two titles that share an acronym but can have distinctly divergent duties. Yet all share a common purpose: using technology to aid operations, increase revenue, and outpace the competition.

In the world of digital media, those are some big responsibilities, especially today, when artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networking, and analytics increasingly perform more of the heavy lifting involved in marketing and sales. Folks in these positions are at the forefront of the new technologies and innovations implemented by a media business. Yet they often aren’t the ones you read about, as presidents and CEOs commonly get the lion’s share of quotes and media attention when such matters are reported on.

However, spend just a little time with a CTO or CDO and you quickly get a sense of how stimulating and forward-thinking their jobs are as well as how in tune they have to be with the latest tech trends that will shape and impact companies pushing content for a living. Case in point: Jess Szmajda, Axios’ recently hired CTO, who’s been brought aboard to help the enterprise build its paid product offerings. Szmajda’s got boundless energy and enthusiasm, but she’s also got a lot on her plate.

Business Driven

“I lead Axios’ tech team in building tools and advancing capabilities for Smart Brevity—our innovative storytelling format that gets to the point and tells you what you need to know and why it matters,” says Szmajda, a transgender woman and the first female CTO of a major media company. “From the forward-facing items that our audience interacts with.” These range from “Axios’ infinitely scrolling stream, newsletters, advertisements, or podcast—to our behind-the-scenes efforts, like ensuring user privacy and supporting highly performant responses during traffic surges, our tech team touches almost every part of the company.”

Not every media property is alike, however, which means that the tech chief’s role can vary, depending on the company. Take, for instance, Joe Simon, Vice Media’s recently enlisted CTO.

“My job involves being across and responsible for all technology activities, including business applications, basic and post-production infrastructure, the cloud, all things digital—like websites and apps—and our broadcast and media operations,” says Simon. “The business functions of CTOs can be extremely different. For example, we support post-production and broadcast, while another CTO may work closer with clients and be in charge of developing new technologies.”

Szmajda notes a common misconception about CTOs—that their main objective is to advance technology for technology’s sake.

“What CTOs actually focus on is finding ways to make technology work better for people. One of my personal goals throughout my career has been to try and build technology that enables and enhances human abilities,” she says. “That’s what the tech team and I are focused on as we develop and innovate Axios’ efficient and valuable way of communicating.”

Data that Delivers

A media player’s CDO, on the other hand, often has a wholly different set of duties. Consider Mike Smith, chief data officer for Hearst Magazines. He’s charged with managing strategy and ongoing development of the firm’s digital advertising operations, data capabilities, and ad product offerings; Smith also supervises CDS Global, a Hearst division that delivers outsourced business solutions across various industries.

“We help our advertisers predict their prospective customers so they can better target ads. They give us data and our data scientists study and merge it with our own collective audience data using machine learning models,” Smith explains. “My role is data-centric but in the service of sales and editorial.”

Smith’s challenges include educating the data scientists who work for him about how advertising works and trying to satisfy advertisers who expect the data richness inherent in a Facebook ad.

“Premium publishers need to hire people who can qualify the data better and serve advertisers better when it comes to their media buys,” adds Smith. “The advertiser wants to purchase your display ads but with data informing that buy. The question is, how do you charge for that?”

Disruption and Distribution

Simon, meanwhile, faces down other types of complications.

“The media industry is going through some pretty big and disruptive changes, and Vice is right in the middle of it. Audience tastes and consumption patterns are all changing, and we need to evolve with those changes—all while focusing on current and expected revenue,” he says.

While the obstacles vary by position, there’s one thing all three of these pros can agree on: The job comes with rewarding perks beyond the paycheck.

“I’m very excited about new distribution options, and I’m fascinated by the diverse and evolving consumption options for our audience. These new opportunities give us a chance to change our business model and offer new products,” Simon says.

As for Szmajda, she’s excited about the prospects of pushing her company forward—in more ways than merely technological.

“One of my favorite things about serving as CTO for Axios is the incredible runway I have to build and scale our tech team,” notes Szmajda. “I have always had a people-first mentality and an intense focus on diversity and inclusion in tech. The field is dominated by white, heterosexual men, and many people don’t see people who look like them or identify with them or think like them, making it hard to break into. Through top-notch hiring efforts and community engagement, I’m really excited to build out this team and its culture.”

Innovation | Revenue

Can media companies be successful software vendors?

April 28, 2016 DCN

Let’s face it, the core technology for any media company is the content management system, which drives everything from organizing, writing, publishing and advertising. When a media company is sufficiently large, the build versus buy CMS debate can often tip towards build. After all, who knows more about your requirements than you. While it’s not easy to build your own system, that hasn’t stopped the likes of Vox Media and The Washington Post from doing just that — and even selling what they’ve built.

Of course it’s one thing to build a platform, it’s another entirely to sell it. Transforming your organization from one that delivers media content to one that markets and sells technology, an entirely different set of skills.

These companies believe that they can export their technology and help other similar companies build their own media empires on top of the technology they’ve developed.

Vox Media, a modern online publishing company and The Washington Post, a venerable publishing brand both saw a need for building their own systems and are looking at selling at least pieces of it. In Vox’s case, Ad Age reported that it has started selling Chorus for Advertisers, a platform for creating, managing and analyzing branded content. The Washington Post is attempting to sell a more complete newsroom management package.

Rolling your own CMS
For companies that opt to build their own systems, the most compelling factors are control and flexibility. There’s no way an off-the-shelf CMS can adapt to the rapidly changing market requirements of a modern media company, says Pablo Mercado, VP of technology at Vox Media.

“By developing them in-house and tailoring them specifically to our needs we foster a “technology company” culture as well as a “media company” culture. This is key to building truly valuable solutions, and the key to thriving in an ever-changing marketplace,” Mercado explained.

He says this ability to hack the system to meet your needs is just not something that an off-the-shelf CMS is well suited do and eventually that would catch up with them. It’s similar reasoning for The Washington Post, which also made the strategic decision to build its own system, rather than get help from an existing vendor.

“I think if you asked our CTO, it’s not a specific capability, but the flexibility to take it where we need to go quickly. You can take something strategically core and what you can excel at and make it part of what you do,” Matthew Monahan, product and sales lead, for Arc Publishing (the Post’s CMS brand) at The Washington Post said.

Many obstacles, but worth the effort
It’s never easy building your own complex software system while trying to keep the old system going and taking into account the complex and varied needs of various stakeholders in a newsroom workflow process.

The Washington Post took a modular approach building various pieces of the system over time such as writing/editing, planning/scheduling/workflow and APIs and integrations into print systems.

“The key thing is that this wasn’t all pre-planned. We didn’t sit down and say we would have our own system. We built solutions to problems we had and integrated them together. It was an iterative, dynamic approach. We had a specific problem with site rendering, so we built a solution and started iterating on it. People start banging on it and you realize what it should become,” Monahan said.

This modular approach helped as they uncoupled from the older system, and allowed them to overlay and work out the kinks in the various pieces in a similar manner.

Vox faced a similar problem trying to avoid mangling its workflows while putting a new system in place. “The key to navigating these challenges, particularly the platform challenge, is again, the successful blending of a technology company culture and media company culture. Which is to say that rather than disappearing for 9 months and then suddenly re-appearing, flipping a switch and changing everyone’s day-to-day workflow and tools, the team must fully engage with the business and its users,” Mercado said.

It’s a different world
The fact is that transforming from a media company to a software company is much harder than it looks. While it may be true that every company is in its own way is becoming a software company, it’s not easy to actually sell software and all that entails, according to DCG analyst Robert Rose.

“They are ill prepared for the customer service aspect of being a technology solution provider. There’s no doubt that their solutions would work well for select clients, especially those looking to get into more media-centered operations (e.g. content marketing). But once they start hearing about things like “implementation” and “channels” and “service contracts” and the complexity of actually operating a “software business,” most companies rethink entering into the market as a solution vendor,” Rose said.

Without a doubt, media companies that make the decision to sell their CMS do so with the hopes of recouping some of the investment made in developing the system. And it is possible that a CMS purpose-built by a media company will better meet the needs of others in the industry. However, while it is clear that diversification is desirable, the software business is a complex one, and time will tell if these companies are up to the task.

Innovation

NewCo Shift launches on Medium, bets on a new kind of publishing platform

April 18, 2016 DCN

John Battelle and Brian Monahan started NewCo a couple of years ago as an events business to shine a light on for-profit companies trying “to make the world a better place.” They believe deeply that the business world is changing, and that it is no longer enough to simply make money for shareholders. Today’s businesses—and, more importantly, the businesses of tomorrow—have to take their employees, consumers, and communities into consideration. Monahan, the chief evangelist, says, he and Battelle realized, “the movement around for-profit businesses trying to solve meaningful problems…deserved an editorial voice.” Now the team has launched NewCo Shift as its editorial wing, on Medium for Publishers.

When Medium—founded by Ev Williams of Twitter—announced its new offering for publishers on April 5, it launched with 12 publisher partners, including The Awl, Electric Literature, and, of course, NewCo Shift. According to Medium’s announcement, “This week we are rolling out new branding tools that will allow publications to customize color, layout, and navigation.” The buzz was immediate. For instance, Wired declared, “Medium Takes Aim at WordPress with a New Way To Power Websites.” Others wondered if abandoning standalone sites and throwing in with Medium’s platform was wise.

Unlike many of the other publishers joining Medium, NewCo did not have much of an editorial presence before the launch. Other than a few blog posts, Monahan says, “The website is more about supporting the events business. It’s not a true editorial presence.” So NewCo Shift did not have to worry about migrating old content (though Medium has built an app to help with migration). And even more importantly, he sees benefits to signing on with this new breed of publishing platform.

The platform
“It seemed like the right fit for us where we are in our life-cycle,” says Monahan. “Publishing on the open web is noisy and it can be hard to fuel discoverability and build community.” The walled-gardens of social media platforms didn’t quite fit either, but Monahan describes Medium as a “true platform.”

When it comes to Medium’s audience hard numbers are tough to come by. In 2015, Medium said it had 25 million monthly unique visitors, while ComScore put that number around 2 million. But founder Williams makes it clear that the company values “TTR” (total time reading) above all else—putting the emphasis on attention metrics, and not just site visits.

Hayley Nelson, general manager of media and product development at NewCo, says the decision to go with Medium was two-fold: “First and foremost were the audience, and the built-in network potential. As we ramp up our publishing efforts, Medium pushes our stories automatically to the network,” she says. “We have a great shot at getting our stories in front of more users by having the greater network of Medium users recommend or share our pieces. It’s like having a store front at the mall, where you get foot traffic, and having a store in the middle of nowhere. It’s a lot easier to get business if you are at the mall!”

Second is the tool itself. She says she’s never seen a faster or easier way to publish content. For a small start-up, this eliminates the need for a team to support the CMS or user interface and experience. “Medium takes all of that guess work out of the equation, with a truly elegant execution that incorporates best-in-class UX thinking about user engagement.”

The business
While NewCo Shift may not be a traditional publisher, the company is still concerned about monetization. Medium anticipated this partner priority, and launched with two ways to make money. Publishers can either host promoted stories from brand partners on their sites, or ask readers to sign up for a membership. Either way, Medium will share in that revenue. However, there is some room for publishers to get creative with their own monetization ideas. NewCo Shift has a “Presenting Sponsor”—which, at the time of launch was Adobe—who gets prominent placement on the masthead of the publication.

“We do intend to sell advertising,” says Monahan. “But right now, the focus is getting the site going.”

The choice to publish via Medium helps companies like NewCo focus on content creation, but it also limits what they can do. Currently, Medium is a closed system so they do not allow outside developers to contribute code or plug-ins. That means that there are many desirable features that won’t be developed until Medium prioritizes them. Nelson says that while it may limit functionality, including tools that help with marketing, email promotion and traffic analysis which are available for WordPress and other systems. However, she believes that Medium’s approach “ensures a high level of quality and a product that is extremely consistent.”

The mindset
In a time when many CMSs seem to be getting more complicated, offering ever-more tools and functionality, some will find the simplicity of Medium to be a breath of fresh air. Nelson says that, “compared to the content management systems that some large, legacy publishers use, it is night and day.” She describes the Medium offering as light and utilitarian with a focus on essential functionality.

“Legacy CMS systems typically have terrible UX for the writers and editors who work in the system. They can be extremely painful and time consuming to use. Medium gives back hours in the day when it comes to efficiency,” says Nelson. Nonetheless, Medium will not likely be replacing legacy CMSs just yet, but Nelson thinks the platform has a place in the strategies of established publishers.

She says it makes sense for any publisher “to build community around an element of their coverage. It may not make sense as a replacement for them, but rather, as a complement.” She notes that many publishers are already experimenting with sharing content through Medium—often as a way to reach new audiences.

Ultimately, Medium may prove to be the starter-CMS of choice for many new and small publishers. What may be most interesting, however, is to see if Medium for Publishers grows alongside its users’ needs (i.e. content personalization, A/B testing, etc.), or if the publisher partners will need to upgrade to a more traditional CMS when their needs evolve with reader expectations.

Innovation

Embedding Technology in All Aspects of Your Content Strategy

August 4, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

It could be my bias, but I’m hard pressed to picture a content strategy that isn’t a digital content strategy. Even organizations that deliver via multiple channels (yes, even print-centric ones) must weave tech into their business plans and way of working. Yet there are still far too many organizations limping along on cumbersome content management systems or kluging together a patchwork of fixes to address emerging distribution channels and evolving marketer expectations.

As a long-time tech journalist, I admit that I look with envy at some of the pure-play digital media companies and their emphasis on smartly integrating technology across all aspects of their business. Consider Vox Media, which takes an approach to technology that is journalism-centric. Wait, no, digital journalism-centric. As Ezra Klein said when leaving the venerable Washington Post to join Vox, today’s journalists are “held back” by systems created to deliver print products. And I’m sure there are many who would echo the sentiment with regards to other systems designed for analog channels that have been adapted to accommodate digital.

Given that many organizations are still reliant on the bulk of their revenue coming from non-digital content, it isn’t surprising that their tech strategy follows suit. Yet the increasing emphasis on digital-first-strategy isn’t limited to journalists longing for tools that will allow them to quickly deliver data-driven stories optimized across multiple channels. Marketers are seeking data-driven solutions optimized across multiple channels as well. Clearly, developing tech strategies that align with these expectations is a must-have. Easier said than done.

But there are those who see technological disruption as an opportunity for innovation. At our new Content All Stars event, Jason Silva–who may be best known as host of National Geographic’s Brain Games (though he is gaining international notoriety as a futurist and digital philosopher)–is looking forward to exploring the technological forces that have blown up the media and marketing landscape and created an infinite opportunity for new ideas to be built up from the rubble.

The Weather Company is certainly no stranger to new ideas either. The company leverages data to drive content and marketing experiences in ways few others have yet envisioned, much less delivered. At Content All Stars, Vikram Somaya, GM of WeatherFX, will take the stage with Bob Ivins of Mindshare, who has the distinction of being the first-ever Chief Data Officer at a media agency. These two will discuss their partnership in exploring the frontier of how data can deliver real-time insights that create bottom-line value.

We’ll also hear from three of the disruptive thinkers on the Vox Media team–co-founder Melissa Bell, Chairman and CEO Jim Bankoff, and VP of Editorial Lockhart Steel (who joined the company after Vox Media acquired his Curbed LLC). They will discuss the company’s distinct approach to integrating technology into every aspect of its business, starting at the core with the creation of content through content management, delivery and monetization.

Join us at Content All Stars to gain insight into how technology can transform your media and marketing efforts and how you can transform the way you think about, develop and implement technology to power-up your content strategy.