Faster and easier publishing drives more engagement

The suc­cess of any news web­site these days is depen­dent on the ease and speed with which jour­nal­ists can pub­lish new con­tent. There is a direct and ben­e­fi­cial effect for the read­er who will expe­ri­ence graph­i­cal­ly rich­er pages and a more intu­itive journey.

But, whilst con­sumers might share the same desire for a more coher­ent and engag­ing dig­i­tal read, jour­nal­ists from dif­fer­ent desks, have very dif­fer­ent pub­lish­ing needs. The chal­lenge has been to cre­ate a sin­gle pub­lish­ing plat­form that could sat­is­fy the needs of both a fash­ion desk and a news desk and every­thing else in between.

As part of a major and ongo­ing devel­op­ment effort, Tele­graph Media Group select­ed Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er to build the new telegraph.co.uk, and at the same time pro­vide a step-change in the inter­nal tools and process­es to facil­i­tate much greater productivity.

The old CMS required a jour­nal­ist to take 58 steps to pub­lish a typ­i­cal arti­cle. A process which would take around 27 min­utes with 7 of those steps repeat­ing mul­ti­ple times. On Tele­graph Author­ing, the new plat­form, the same arti­cle can be pub­lished in 4 min­utes, using only 12 required steps, free­ing jour­nal­ists to focus on the con­tent itself rather than the delivery.

A log­i­cal author­ing interface

Work­ing in a unique blend­ed team struc­ture with the Tele­graph, WPP dig­i­tal agency, Cog­nifide have helped to devel­op the author expe­ri­ence. The build­ing blocks at the heart of the sys­tem are a series of new scal­able com­po­nents, flex­i­ble enough to allow for dif­fer­ent jour­nal­ist needs, but at the same time, ensur­ing a coher­ent design for the site as a whole.

This frees jour­nal­ists to focus on con­tent, not on the struc­ture of the site. Com­po­nents and tem­plates sup­port a tag-dri­ven approach so that con­tent appears in par­tic­u­lar places by virtue of the way in which it has been tagged by the author, rather than because it has been explic­it­ly placed on the site, which now hap­pens in a lim­it­ed num­ber of places. Read­ers reap the ben­e­fits of a care­ful­ly ‘guid­ed’ experience.

Mobile first

The new site is ful­ly respon­sive and designed with mobile in mind. So a read­er switch­ing from desk­top to mobile should find the expe­ri­ence just as reward­ing. Dur­ing the next phas­es of the project, the brows­er based author­ing tool will also aim to enable reporters to file sto­ries from the field on their hand­held devices.

The scale of this pro­gramme was a chal­lenge, and ensur­ing that a large enter­prise sys­tem, such as AEM, was applic­a­ble to the unique usage of a News organ­i­sa­tion was not always smooth, but with the strong sup­port of the experts at TMG, Cog­nifide and Adobe the 15-month ini­tial phase of the pro­gramme was deliv­ered with­in a day of the plan.

I’ll be talk­ing about Tele­graph Media Group’s jour­ney at Adobe Sum­mit at Excel on 11th-12th May.

Hope to see you there!