Pathfinder Helps Newspaper Group Develop Platform for Delivering Hyperlocal Content

Company:

The Sun-Times News Group (STNG) is the publisher of over 98 newspapers covering the Chicago metropolitan area and news group web sites with over 4 million unique monthly visitors and over 50 million page views per month.

Challenge:

STNG was constrained by technology from fully leveraging the strength of their network to provide both hyper-local and regional content across multiple channels and properties. Existing solutions were inflexible, had cumbersome and time consuming publishing processes as well as poor usability. Systems were not extensible, making it very difficult to integrate new types of content, sections, feeds and publications. STNG needed a new solution that would enable them to leverage their strengths in order to keep up with and get ahead of the competition in an increasingly and rapidly changing market.

Solution:

Pathfinder worked with STNG to design and build an extensible platform that will enable the Sun-Times to grow their online business for years to come. The system is designed to be extensible to new formats and new interaction types, and is extremely scalable and flexible. Features include registration and fine grained access control, dynamic content delivery, personalization, dayparting, integration of an ever growing variety of rich media assets and feeds, blogging and other interactive elements. The system automates the delivery of many different feed types, from editorial feeds to AP to sports scores. The system enables management of content across different systems, so that the same content can be used across different print publications and digital channels, and has dramatically improved process efficiencies by automating tasks that had previously been manual. The publishing process has been dramatically speeded up, and the flexible platform has enabled STNG to roll out new features in rapid fashion.

Impact:

The benefit of the platform’s capability to rapidly create new, dynamic applications was dramatically illustrated when STNG was able to rapidly fill the void left by the City News Service that their cross town rival, the Chicago Tribune, discontinued. In February of 2006 it took two weeks to create STNG Wire, a 24 hour newswire used by TV, radio stations and newspapers throughout the area. The key to the operation, staffed by veterans of both the original and the Tribune-run City News, is the Daybook, the invaluable daily listing of press conferences, court activity and other events throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, which is shared with subscribers and the Sun Times News Group family. STNG Wire has been a huge success for the Sun-Times, is extremely efficient, and very profitable.

Since then, the platform has been launched for the entire STNG family of 98 publications, with significant new features rolled out in monthly releases over a two year period.