Digital transformation: From launching a new website to true cultural change

This piece details how 23 news brands in the Denver metro area relaunched their digital sites. You’ll learn:

• The importance of surveying audience and key findings
• How the new site helped them grow their newsletters 
• Key lessons from the relaunch
• Advice you can apply in your organization

Author Amalie Nash is the head of transformation for the National Trust for Local News.

Digital transformation — which can include upgrading your content management system, revamping newsletters, establishing key performance indicators and becoming more audience-centric — is not for the faint of heart. 

But it’s necessary work for the National Trust for Local News as it builds a community news business model that is powered by digital audience, subscription and advertiser revenues.

The National Trust owns Colorado Community Media (CCM), which has 23 news brands in the Denver metro area and a legacy that stretches back a century. Last spring, CCM embarked on the complex and often messy process of relaunching its digital sites. The result: 24 separate websites (the 23 brands + Colorado Community Media) were brought under the same site architecture, allowing for a much cleaner experience, easier content sharing, faster publishing times, improved search equity and additional multimedia elements.

The project also was a milestone for the National Trust, which is focused on transforming the community newspapers it has acquired into digitally-forward, revenue-positive news brands. NTLN owns a portfolio of some 60 publications across Colorado, Maine and Georgia, where it has honed a transformation playbook that it expects to scale to 10 states in the next few years. 

A screenshot of the redesigned Colorado Community Media homepage.

The new site, which went live Sept. 23, was a partnership between local leadership, Newspack (for the CMS) and BlueLena (for audience acquisition work). Grants from the Google News Initiative and Colorado Media Project helped to fund it. 

“The greatest advantage was we were able to leave behind a lot of antiquated infrastructure,” Colorado Community Media Publisher Linda Shapley said. “When the original sites were created, SEO was not the driver it is now. The ability to combine the work we’ve done into one place is an added benefit.”

Getting from vision to launch day

Despite close geographic proximity between titles, Colorado Community Media’s websites have always been separate, meaning readers could not easily navigate from news in their city to news in the neighboring city. The sites were not mobile-friendly and lacked multimedia capabilities. News was slow to go live on a content management system that frequently created delays during busy publishing times.

To prepare for a new site, Colorado Community Media surveyed its audience of subscribers and registered users by email in July, asking such questions as where people get their news, what topics are of highest interest and what subscriber benefits appeal to them most.

Among the findings: subscribers value access to the e-edition (electronic replica of the newspaper) and want more coverage of local government, things to do and local real estate, among other things. They were fairly evenly divided on the platforms in which they prefer to consume their news.

“Local media is the only way citizens can see what is happening in local government and schools,” one respondent wrote. “Without that window, citizens cannot make informed decisions on how their daily lives are being impacted.”

To aid in the digital transition, Colorado Community Media engaged Newspack and BlueLena, which are no strangers to website launches and audience growth strategies. But neither company had embarked on a project quite like that presented by CCM — bringing together 24 sites with a cohesive approach and vision.

Joe Boydston, technical account manager for Newspack, a WordPress-based publishing platform, said CCM’s project was the largest consolidation Newspack has done. It led to Newspack’s new multi-branding feature, which is now available to all of its customers, allowing publishers to bring multiple brands onto one platform that users can navigate across seamlessly.

“We pioneered multi-branding with CCM, and it scratched an itch that we did not realize publishers had,” Boydston said. 

BlueLena is a digital marketing and revenue management platform that works with more than 200 independent news publishers. It was tasked for the first time with consolidating many websites into one single site, said Megan Vaughn, strategy and solutions consultant for BlueLena. Their work included helping to develop a paywall strategy and messaging, and developing new onboarding journeys for registered users and subscribers.

“I think our biggest goal was this: How do we come up with a successful, cohesive strategy for a major combined organization like Colorado Community Media, while also preserving the legacy and the value proposition for the publications that exist under this umbrella?” Vaughn said.

The project team began meeting last summer. Along the way, the team worked through many issues — how the site should look, how many categories it should have for stories and how display advertising should be integrated. 

“Feedback was critical to getting it right,” Boydston said. “There were a couple areas where we pivoted the workflow during the migration.”

For instance, the homepage of Colorado Community Media was redesigned close to the launch date as the teams strived for the right look, content mix and navigation to the communities it serves.

The planned launch was delayed — although not substantially — as the teams worked to ensure a smooth transition with elements such as the archives, classified advertising and more.

“From a cultural standpoint, we started in earnest to show how the site would work and get people trained over the summer,” Shapley said. “But it wasn’t until after the site was live that people really understood.” 

Deborah Grigsby Smith, CCM’s digital editor, cited efficient workflows, including plug-ins, multimedia elements and the ability to see analytics, as some of the notable improvements since the relaunch.

“The user interface is a definite improvement,” she said of what readers now see when they visit the site. 

A surprising byproduct of the new site: newsletter growth

The new website went live prior to Colorado’s fall elections, offering Colorado Community Media an opportunity to showcase its coverage in new and different ways. 

The team published more than 140 stories prior to and post-election, leading to record traffic to the site on election week: 71K page views and 23K visitors that Monday and 83K page views and 34K visitors that Tuesday. Explainers, summaries of past coverage and useful information for voters led to high numbers.

It’s not possible to compare metrics prior to launch to now since each site was previously separate, but web traffic has stabilized, averaging about 14K page views per week.

One surprising but welcome result: Newsletter growth has exploded since the relaunch, in large part due to the ease of sign-up and the prominent callouts to subscribe to newsletters across the site.

A screenshot showing CCM’s newsletter sign-up field.

All of CCM’s newsletters grew more than 50% from the time of launch until the end of the year — just three months — and the overall newsletter list grew from 5,700 to 14,000 recipients. Revenue tied to the newsletters also continues to rise, providing a new revenue stream that didn’t exist just a year ago.

In January, CCM introduced its first bilingual newsletter — La Ciudad, serving residents of Commerce City — thanks to a Beyond Print Convening grant from the American Press Institute. That newsletter has now topped 500 subscribers and continues to grow.

“It was very surprising growth, and it continues to grow at a good pace,” Shapley said. 

Vaughn said newsletter growth, among other things, was a goal for BlueLena.

“For our team, success means that CCM has a solid top-to-bottom audience funnel strategy in place. They have the tools and the knowledge to run a robust end-of-year campaign, launch a new newsletter and grow subscriptions,” she said. “We also believe in an iterative approach: we want to work with the CCM team to continuously evaluate and evolve the strategy over the next several years to promote their success.”

Looking back: What are the lessons learned?

Like any project of this magnitude, there’s plenty to learn — from how to better influence cultural change to how to manage all of the moving parts. 

Grigsby, the digital editor, said she’d have a stronger game plan before starting, from the cadence of communications to timelines and assignments.

“As we went forward, there were times I didn’t know what I was responsible for,” she said. “I’d have a solid plan and understand each party’s responsibility, grill everyone and paper everything with sticky notes.”

Grigsby said she’d also encourage other publishers to plan for what she called the “post-transition hangover” and properly staff the help desk function.

“Handholding tasks, password resets, rebuilding forms and assisting reporters with post basics — keywords, photos, custom HTML — became a fulltime job on top of daily digital tasks,” she said. “If I could do it all over again, I would have added at least two interns/temp employees for 60 days to help facilitate the post-migration hangover. Much of the work was done remotely, but I think it is important for those planning to do the same to plan for a surge in handholding and rebuilds.”

Vaughn said the BlueLena team learned from the multi-site consolidation. 

“We did a lot of in-depth strategy work during this launch that has translated well to other publishers,” she said. “We learned a lot in this process about how to best understand the audience, goals, value proposition, etc. from the beginning  and then translated that into our lifecycle curriculum.”

Shapley said it’s important to understand changing the culture will take more time than simply flipping the switch on a new CMS.

“More people are finding us and working through us, so it’s much easier to make the argument to be digital-first in the newsroom,” she said. “But the organization is still very pulled down by the gravity of print, and we hear people say they’ll do the story for next week, as opposed to now because it matters now to our community. It’s a longtime process to get to a culture shift, but we’re learning.” 

Finally, what advice can these stakeholders offer to others?

Communication is key: “Make sure you have a good idea of who will be doing what — in regard to people on your own staff AND the vendors. Once that is established, make sure they are clearly communicated to everyone who is working through the transition, to ensure that one person does not get overwhelmed with every request and that they know they can offload something to another group.” — Linda Shapley, publisher, Colorado Community Media

Think strategy first: “If I had to give publishers one piece of advice, it would be this: Lay the strategy groundwork first and then build the technical pieces around that. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the daunting technical tasks of a project like this, but figure out why your publication(s) exist, the relationship you have with your readers, and how your publication(s) create meaning in the communities you serve. Once you do this, the technical setup becomes much more intentional and straightforward.” — Megan Vaughn, strategy and solutions consultant for BlueLena

Establish goals: “We like to plan for success, but we don’t always measure it. There are many variables in play when re-launching a website. Take the time to identify metrics you have control over and set goals that key people can participate in and celebrate.” — Joe Boydston, technical account manager for Newspack

Meanwhile, the National Trust for Local News is already implementing these lessons as it continues to test and refine its transformation strategies. In December, it announced the Georgia Trust for Local News, a portfolio of 18 newspapers serving some of the most rural communities in the southeastern United States. The Georgia Trust has begun its initial digital transformation work, which in some cases will mean launching websites for newspapers that previously had no digital presence at all.