Industries

Media & Publishing

How our engineering and content work applies to news and publishing operations — content platforms, editorial workflows, migrations off ageing CMS installations, and the search performance a content business runs on.

Where this applies

A publishing operation is a content platform with an editorial process attached and a search dependency underneath. When any of the three breaks, the business feels it immediately: editors route around a slow admin, a migration loses URLs and takes traffic with it, or a redesign quietly drops the structured data that put articles in search results.

Our people have spent more than a decade on content sites, news operations and CMS platforms — both building them and living with the ones already in place. That is a different kind of knowledge from having read the documentation: it is knowing which parts of a migration go wrong, and which admin conveniences editors will abandon a system over.

The kind of work involved

  • Content platform work: modelling content types that survive contact with a real editorial team, and building the workflows around them rather than bending an off-the-shelf model until it almost fits.
  • Migrations off an ageing CMS, treating URLs, redirects, canonical tags and structured data as load-bearing. A migration that loses the search position of a decade of archive has failed regardless of how the new site looks.
  • Editorial tooling that respects the pace of the newsroom — publishing, scheduling, and revision handling that does not make an editor wait.
  • Search and structured data as part of the build rather than a phase after it, so articles are machine-readable from the day they publish.
  • Content and messaging work for organisations whose subject is more technical than their current site admits.

Engineering behind it

Our own content-platform work has gone through three generations, each answering a different question about how content should be modelled and delivered. They are described on our Engineering page, along with the reasoning behind each one. We also work inside third-party platforms where replacing one would be the wrong call.

A note on fit

A note on fit

This is engineering and content work applied to publishing, not a media product we resell. Where an existing platform is serving a newsroom well, the honest answer is search, content and workflow work on top of it rather than a rebuild — and a rebuild proposed to a publisher who does not need one is an expensive way to lose archive traffic.

Related services

The services this industry draws on.