Creating a Centralized CMS for 39 Local News Stations

Interactive Solution: Streamlined Media and Data-Driven Content Management

A Fresh, Intuitive Interface with Integrated Media Editing

In the breaking news industry, every second counts when it comes to content production. Newsrooms need an efficient and intuitive interface for both uploading images and videos, creating articles and galleries. We created an upload flow that allowed editors to quickly assign the correct metadata and copyrights to either singular media, or to entire galleries at once. It also allowed them to make edits to any given piece of media right within the CMS, rather than disrupting their workflow to open up a separate image or video editing tool.

Data Driven Content Recommendations

Editors also needed a way to determine which content already produced by other stations would be a good fit for their own station’s audience. We solved this through designing a dashboard that ingests data from various analytics platforms and calculates a “Tegna Value Score” for every story. The score was comprised of the four core business metrics Tegna focuses on: visits per visitor, video views, social interactions, and monthly uniques. The dashboard would then use this shared score to rank stories from across the entire Tegna network, filtering out any stories that a given station had already published — resulting in a data driven, personalized list of stories that a station should consider publishing.

Headline Testing at a Scale

Another key solution was to integrate strategic insights within the platform. Instead of just supporting teams in their efforts to complete their work, the CMS actually drove the work to be better, improving core business metrics. By integrating A/B testing with the content creation process, editors could input multiple headline options for a single story within their native workflow, without the extra effort of exiting to login to a separate tool. This allows for more headline tests to be run than when editorial teams were forced to use a separate tool. Once each test is run, the winning result is distributed throughout the entire network to every station that has published that story — multiplying the effects of the winner.