Digitizing Content Production with a Suite for 500+ Journalists

Description

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The customer delivered a visual-rich suite for content creation/storage used by 500+ journalists across 20+ newsrooms.
• With the embedded metadata, the system plays a critical role in personalizing content based on user behavior, location, interests, etc. Integrated with an analytical platform used for subscription/advertising, it also provides editors with automated topic suggestions to serve the goal.
• The customer secured a 3 million SEK grant from the Swedish government for developing their reporters ecosystem.
• The developed CMS-like platform was successfully sold as a white-label product to other media outlet.
• The ability to survive and innovate in the digital age led to the company’s acquisition by a larger media holding.

The customer

At the time of the project, the company was one of Sweden's major media groups with 20+ local news outlets. With a focus on data-driven journalism and a commitment to providing rich, locally relevant, timely content, the customer engaged with millions of readers daily.

The need

With the ongoing decline of the traditional media, the company aimed to focus on news relevance and personalization. Understanding the limitations of common CMS systems, which are not suited for a media group with dozens of outlets, the customer decided to create a custom platform for all the 500 journalists engaged. However, the company’s initial MVP—developed with an external vendor—suffered from regular release delays and failed to meet the project’s goals.

Seeking assistance, the company turned to Altoros for the front-end expertise.

The challenges

The team had to address the following issues:

• Priority was given to thoroughly attaching and storing articles’ metadata (e.g., topics of interest, geolocation, paid/free, time, etc.). This vital data needed to fuel the analytical platform enabling personalization for readers.
• Aiming to shorten the time between the peak of content consumption and publishing, the customer cared about consistent drag-and-drop functionality, dynamic visualizations, etc.
• The system needed to enable the possibility of cross-newsroom workflows, letting reporters publish their drafts to several outlets of the company for review/distribution.

The solution

Stage 1. Fostering direct communication with stakeholders and editors/reporters, the Altoros team held the discovery phase right at the customer's headquarters. Onsite, the engineers collected all the requirements, helping to prioritize main features and establish a clear roadmap.

Stage 2. Our solutions architect introduced a technology stack required to deliver the needed flexibility. Within a week onsite, the developers rolled out a proof of concept demonstrating how Draft.js enables to build highly customizable rich text editors and address other requirements.

Stage 3. Then, the engineers at Altoros developed key modules: a visual editor, a media library, an advanced search, and a user settings component. A rich, drag-and-drop interface enabled journalists to attach geolocation by using an interactive map, preview visual search results in real time, easily choose a destination outlet(-s) within the draft, etc. The team helped to seamlessly integrate the content suite into the customer’s data platform used for managing subscriptions and distribution.

Stage 4. After the system was launched in production, the experts from Altoros revisited the customer’s premises to engage with a pilot audience. This helped the company to adjust the product according to early, firsthand feedback.

Stage 5. The engineers covered the system with end-to-end tests using Puppeteer and Mocha to ensure robust and reliable releases stable across all the newsrooms. Over the course of several years, Altoros provided ongoing support and maintenance for the system.

The outcome

Relying on Altoros, the customer developed a smart content production suite for 500+ journalists across 20+ editorial teams, being able to get stable revenues from subscriptions and ads while other traditional media shut down. By harnessing cluster-based metadata from the system, the company’s analytical platform enables highly personalized, locally relevant content, resulting in 10–20% increased daily activation rates. With this tool, the customer secured a 3 million SEK grant from the Swedish government for further development. Moreover, the system was purchased as a product by other media outlet and eventually caught the attention of a larger media holding, leading to an acquisition.