Stibo DX helps media houses gain flexible and agile storytelling with CUE

Stibo DX is one of the market leaders in editorial content management systems and publishing platforms. The company develops content creation and publishing platforms for media and brand publishers all over the world. They help their customers create engaging content, reach new audiences, and run a profitable business. For more than three decades, Stibo DX has been a leading technology partner for some of the world’s biggest news and media companies, such as The Times of India, The New York Times, The Economist, Gannett, Axel Springer and others.

Having been in the industry since 1979, Stibo DX was formerly known as CCI and Escenic, the company has a long history of developing editorial software solutions for news publishers. Among the company’s solutions are NewsGate, Escenic, and CUE which are used by a wide selection of news publishers, from large newspaper groups and national broadcasters to small digital pure players. CUE is the publishing platform for creative storytellers, perfectly designed for news publishers who are looking to engage their audience with immersive stories and premium content. Amedia in Norway has adopted CUE to collect all their favourite tools in one intuitive interface.

“In 2019, we migrated all our media to CUE, and the best quantifiable feedback I can give is that we are still growing measured by all relevant parameters: reach, reader-engagement, and the number of digital subscribers. Looking at the numbers, everything points in the right direction,” explains Pål Nedregotten, Executive Vice President in Charge of Innovation, Business Development and Strategic Analysis at Amedia.

Increasing subscribers

With 75 local papers and websites, Amedia is the largest regional news publisher in Norway. The company’s outlets reach more than 2.2 million Norwegians or more than half of the adult population each day. Even more impressive, though, is the fact that Amedia has succeeded in increasing the number of digital subscribers—fast approaching 300,000 —for six years in a row.

“Our business model is pretty straight forward: we publish stories that matter to local communities across Norway. Journalism is at the core of our DNA because creating the right journalism is key to delivering local value. At least as important, though, is the continuous analytics that help us develop and tweak our content to deliver what readers appreciate—definitely not to be confused with click bait-journalism,” says Pål Nedregotten.

Mission of CMS migration

Amedia has been growing its digital business since 2014 through a combination of continuous and sustained effort into local journalism and through powerful analytics. But the old content management system was unable to keep up. “Therefore, it was mission-critical to migrate to a modern, more flexible and scalable solution that could be used across all 75 publications,” explains Pål Nedregotten.

He adds, “Furthermore, we needed to be more agile as a company and much better able to support the creation of content through more efficient workflows and easier cooperation. In short, we wanted to enable our journalists to use their time and creativity to tell interesting and compelling stories, not to grapple with cumbersome IT-systems.”

A step into modern world

Pål Nedregotten says they have taken a step into the modern world with CUE. He continues, “We chose CUE as the successor to an older system, as CUE is a modern, more flexible, browser-based solution with an HTML-based framework. Furthermore, the two systems shared several technical similarities which eased the migration-process to a certain extent. We are not completely out of the woods yet. But we are undoubtedly in a happier place now than a year ago.”

“With the new step into the modern world, much of the rigidity of the old system—and a lot of the tech-dependencies—is a history today. Furthermore, CUE supports the creation of content such as text, video, and multimedia to a larger degree. Perhaps of equal importance is that CUE offers the flexibility to integrate our own services into the journalists’ workflow—for example, automatic classification and tag suggestions, as well as a host of other, future integrations—a sore spot in the old system,” he explains.

Pål Nedregotten conclusively says that during 2020, they expect that CUE will be one of the important elements in Amedia’s digital transition and help them push business forward through scalability and rapid iteration. That is an important element in their journey to become an even more agile and flexible organisation– and to put them in an even better position to grow reach and engagement from readers.