Working in partnership on a live blogging tool
In 2015 we worked with our CMS supplier, Escenic, to develop a live-blogging plug-in for Content Studio. Like most projects, developing Live Centre provided product and engineering challenges, but we also learnt about working in partnership.
Speed matters
In a world of 24/7 news, free access to hundreds of online publications and constant updates from social media, live blogging is an important tool for publishers. Speed matters. Users want real-time coverage of breaking news, combined with summaries, background and analysis — the things that differentiate journalism from the firehose of updates on social media.
Prior to Live Centre, our in-house developers had built a live blogging tool using Escenic’s core functionality and data model. It worked, enabling us to provide live coverage and understand what journalists and users wanted, but there were several issues. The editorial interface was clunky and it didn’t scale well as the number of entries increased, resulting in poor performance.
When we started talking about rebuilding the tool, we had four goals:
- Solve the existing issues
- Improve the speed of publishing
- Enable mobile publishing
- Enhance the end-user experience
Our ambition was to put updates in front of the end user within a second of the journalist hitting publish.
Partnership vs professional services
The idea of a partnership emerged from informal discussions at the Escenic Customer Days in Oslo in June 2014. We formed a project team with people from both companies and organised a workshop in London to establish the partnership and agree on the minimum viable product.
A partnership is different from a professional services engagement, and it was important to understand that. For a partnership to be successful, the partners need overlapping interests, but they also need to bring different knowledge, skills and resources. If you don’t have something in common, you’re wasting your time, but if you don’t have some differences, you aren’t gaining anything. You might as well go it alone and avoid the overheads of communicating and coordinating across teams.
We recognised that we had different goals. Escenic wanted a new plug-in to enhance their product, whereas we wanted to improve our coverage of breaking news. The new plug-in, Live Centre, would benefit both companies, but there were elements of the overall project that would only serve one or the other. For example, enhancements to our front-end styling to improve the user experience only benefited us, so that was clearly our responsibility.
Remembering we had different goals also helped when we were debating which features were required for MVP. If a feature would be important for most publishers, we could make an argument for including it, because it would give Escenic a better product. If it was specific to our particular systems and approach, it belonged on our side of the To Do list.
Our different contributions were also important. Escenic brought deep knowledge of Content Studio and Content Engine, and the ability to integrate new features into the core CMS product. They were also able to align the user interface with their overall UI roadmap, ensuring a consistent experience for journalists. Trinity Mirror brought extensive experience of live reporting and a deep understanding of the tool and site requirements from developing our previous tool. We were also able to test and validate Live Centre, initially with our QA team and then with journalists. Finally, both companies benefited from having a larger team. Escenic provided additional development resource, and we bolstered their product and project management.
Working together
Trinity Mirror has both in-house developers and an outsourced development team based in Romania, so we’re used to collaborating with remote teams.
We managed several face-to-face sessions, in both London and Oslo. Despite the cost of travel, the time wasted in airports and the need to purchase 1kg bags of Toblerone* to placate non-travelling colleagues, it’s always worth meeting in person. The conversations you have about the strangeness of Pret’s Kale Crisps during a hastily purchased lunch may not seem important, but they lay the foundations for easy communication throughout the project.
* Other confectionary is available, but apparently not as good
Both companies use Google Apps, so we were able to have regular video calls via Hangouts and collaborate in shared documents, and Escenic gave us access to their JIRA board to track stories. Having a range of options for formal communication also encouraged people to reach out via email or chat for ad-hoc conversations rather than wait for a scheduled call.
Live and thriving
Eighteen months after the initial conversations, Live Centre is up and running across Trinity Mirror’s 30+ online publications. We achieved our goal of subsecond updates and the average number of entries in a live blog has increased because journalists can create them more quickly.
We’ve used Live Centre to cover everything from major news events such as the Paris shootings to fires and road closures affecting our local audiences. It has also been used for football matches, boxing, talent shows and even the Mirror Hustings, a one-off event where a panel of readers grilled the Labour leadership candidates.
Editorial feedback has been very positive, with comments such as:
“The speed everything updates — whether it’s going live or amends — is really helpful.”
“A lot more stable. All of our Rugby World Cup blogs has been done remotely without a single technical issue.”
“The new Live Centre has been night and day compared to the old system.”
Users have also responded positively, with increases in engagement and time spent.
The partnership had its challenges, including misunderstandings about workflows and conflicts in priorities, but the work we’d done to understand each other’s goals and establish good communication helped us resolve those issues and keep going. The new tool is better than we could have produced on our own, and I like to think its better than Escenic could have produced on their own — which is the ultimate test of a partnership.
Escenic’s web site has more information about Live Centre and video presentations about the editorial and technical aspects of this project.
