The Forum Communications challenge
In the regional news business for more than 140 years, Forum Communications owns publications that span media markets in Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota and include local-media brands such as the Brainerd Dispatch, The Rochester Post Bulletin and Fargo’s Inforum.com.
In our previous system, it took two weeks or more to create a new section on our websites. It had to be entirely engineering work, which meant that it was simply a lot of work each time. Now with Brightspot, we can create a new section via configuration in 10 minutes. The newsroom is themselves creating new pages to serve individual needs of certain content types, etc.
As is the challenge with many print publishers looking to service growing digital audiences with an appetite for tailored local news and information, the publisher needed to consolidate onto a single content management system (CMS) platform to lower the total cost of ownership across a single technology solution that would meet the needs of its teams of journalists and content producers.
The solution also needed to support revenue-driving services for the business across a mix of digital display, metered paywall access and membership- and subscription-based platform offerings.
The Brightspot solution for Forum Communications
The first properties in the Forum Communications portfolio migrated onto the company’s new multisite CMS starting in late 2021.
Brightspot has unleashed tons of creativity in our newsroom. Our overall agility has skyrocketed because so many things that used to require code now just take a couple of clicks. We can now tell stories and enrich our readers’ lives in so many ways we couldn’t previously.
Back-end improvements to the publishing experience included a modern and dynamic rich-text editing interface plus various tools to support ease of publishing across essential media content types including articles, videos, podcasts and other audio formats. CMS workflows and customizable roles, permissions and content templates empowered editorial teams to take full ownership of the publishing process without costly and extensive support from development teams.
On the front end, Forum Communications’ brands benefited from best-in-class digital experiences, including greatly improved page layouts and navigation, responsive mobile-first designs, optimized page-load speeds and other features to improve SEO.
The outcome for Forum Communications
The engineers are freed up to do truly innovative engineering work. We’re able to just move much more quickly and respond to the news of the day.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the positive outcomes from Forum’s migration to Brightspot comes with the benefits that have led to regional audiences seeking the best and most relevant local news. “Easier to use and faster to find—that’s the kind of news experience you deserve,” is how the Post-Bulletin characterized it when announcing its website redesign in December 2021.
Along with a better digital experience, the customer experience has been transformed with new tools to manage subscriber access and preferences, as well as improvements to the advertising experience to serve targeted local ads over less relevant non-local ad inventory.
Behind the scenes, newsroom teams are equipped to tell the story faster and better with greater flexibility and dynamism. This includes the ability to easily manage and craft the whole digital experience, from the homepage and section fronts down to editorially curated topics tags and in-article enhancements and hooks—all without requiring a single line of code.
