POLITICO by the numbers
The POLITICO challenge
The fast-paced demands of POLITICO's newsroom have evolved over the 15 years it's been creating buzz in the market—and Brightspot has been there since 2015 to match CMS functionality to all those demands as they've developed.
POLITICO averages more than 50 million visitors each month. Publishing over 5,000 newsletters in 2021, covering everything from the European elections to Washington, D.C., lobbying, the site also serves up a wide range of articles, podcasts and interactive content across brands such as POLITICO Pro and its AgencyIQ data service.
Curating and distributing all that content needs a solid editorial management foundation. This has been made possible with Brightspot CMS, with which POLITICO recently went through a significant upgrade to version 4 of the platform.
At POLITICO, our mission is to deliver non-partisan, fact-based news and information. We tailor our products around our audience of policymakers, regulators and decision makers, so for us, our audience is really everything. And with so many visitors coming to POLITICO for our politics and policy content, it is critical we have a robust technology stack to support and enhance the work our journalists do.
The Brightspot solution for POLITICO
For us, Brightspot offers a lot of benefits: we are really excited to be able to pair the out-of-the-box features that come with the upgraded version of Brightspot with our custom development to be able to provide a sleek, modern CMS for our evolving newsroom.
During a recent gathering of Brightspot CMS users, POLITICO's Kelsey Miller said this of the CMS's place in the POLITICO publishing workflow: "Brightspot’s main function for us is content management and publication," she said, adding that since the original Brightspot implementation a number of site redesigns and functional enhancements have been added through custom development of the platform.
The 2022 upgrade to Brightspot's version 4 was a huge cross-functional effort between the tech, product and editorial teams, and delivered what Kelsey called a "welcome visual and functional upgrade to the newsroom."
But the migration also opened the door for optimization of a number of existing processes, too. Prior to version 4, multiple distinct content types were used to publish articles, forcing editors to remember complex rules for each.
"It was really cumbersome for our production and editing teams to switch back and forth between these content types, so now we have implemented one shared article model used by all of our CMS sites," said Kelsey.
Things are now a lot easier, due to the many customization tools Brightspot offers, including content forms and user permissions. New syndication features to simplify sharing editorial content among political product lines have also been implemented to notify users when an article is syndicated to prevent confusion when they’re managing content in a busy news cycle.
Kelsey said users also love their new integration with both Slack, for CMS alerts and notifications, and federated-search connections to access digital assets in AP and Getty image libraries.
POLITICO project highlights include:
- A centralized content repository that provides enterprise-wide access and encourages the reuse and repurpose of shared content.
- The ability to launch new page and site experiences quickly and easily without reliance on developers.
- Subscription, license, and user management across POLITICO.com and POLITICO PRO within the same CMS platform and SSO capabilities for users.
POLITICO in brief
Website
HeadquartersArlington, Virginia
IndustryMedia & publishing
Customer since2015
CMS use case
