Eliminating editorial inefficiencies and enhancing collaboration for a modernized digital newsroom

In 2014, as U.S. News & World Report grew its digital presence, the organization realized its legacy CMS had become a hindrance to scalability and innovation. Editors and journalists wasted time creating complicated workarounds for an outdated platform, which ultimately delayed publishing timelines.

To cut down on editorial inefficiencies, the publisher sought a modern solution that could consolidate all publishing operations and streamline the process with customizable workflows, a built-in digital asset manager, and intuitive content syndication tools. The organization also needed a solution that could integrate seamlessly with its homegrown CMS, which housed the publisher’s flagship website and famous rankings reports, to prevent loss of traffic or revenue during the transition.

It’s been four years since the initial implementation, and our editorial staff continues to be very happy with the CMS. U.S. News anticipates using Brightspot for many years to come.

Brightspot’s modern CMS platform empowered U.S. News & World Report to:

• Unify nearly all publishing operations within one CMS, with a single authoring point and a common codebase.
• Integrate the new platform seamlessly into the organization’s existing tech stack with minimal business interruption.
• Maximize editorial efficiency with customizable workflows, tailored notifications, rich-text editing, live preview and a built-in digital asset manager.
• Manage taxonomy for consistent tagging making it easy to find and manage all digital assets within a single, easy-to-use interface.
• Increase revenue by making it easy to search, package and syndicate content both internally and externally.
• Optimize the site for mobile, ensuring a consistent digital experience no matter the device.

With just five months from proof of concept to launch, Brightspot provided U.S. News & World Report with exactly what it needed: taxonomy management, flexible workflows and notifications, syndication tools and much more. Key site features that the publisher continues to enjoy today include:

• Digital asset management tools for easy search, upload and retrieval of any asset in CMS as well as third-party sources via federated search capabilities.
• Flexible editorial workflows that can be tailored to busy publishing teams for optimal efficiency and delivery.
• Live preview and collaboration tools to ensure every story is accurate and formatted correctly across devices.
• Syndication of U.S. News content to social-media platforms, partners and agencies in order to maximize reach and revenue opportunities.