Tune In
I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with lifelong friend and all-around great guy Michael Suhr on developing a platform and news/content delivery strategy for his family broadcasting company. M&H Broadcasting serves south central and south east Iowa markets in Knoxville, Pella and Washington. The work has been some of the most collaborative I’ve ever done. Our friendly relationship and Mike’s desire to keep on top of what we doing technically meant the process needed to be open and iterative. Fortunately for both of us, we weren’t pressured by artificial dates and milestones, not typical but definitely successful in this case.
What we put together was a news-delivery platform built on WordPress, using off-the-shelf tools and plugins and a lot creative customizations. Our initial investment in ‘getting it right’ for the Knoxville/Pella station has already paid dividends as we work to roll out the Washington station site in the coming weeks. The goal was a design reminiscent of the old site but flexible and adaptive enough to grow with the content and news needs of users going forward. Another big requirement was that staff could feel empowered to make changes and own the content, which to-date has been quite successful. WordPress provide great tools for content creators to author, edit and manage their work.
M&H has a team of reporters gathering local news for on-air broadcast but they also capture audio and video for on-web publishing. This reporting is essential in smaller, more rural markets that typically have weekly or semi-daily papers and fall under the radar of local television broadcast news. The reporting M&H are doing is consistently half a day or more ahead of local television, and their devoted web readers show that they are the primary news-source for these areas. needless to say it’s thrill to be part of something that people use and rely on, particularly for the community I grew up in.
Here are some highlights:
• Used a selection of Fugue icons with some of my own thrown in as well
• A fair bit of jquery behind the scenes and a few UI touches
• Yahoo! Pipes to created aggregated and multi-tag/multi-category RSS feeds
• PHP5 DOM screen scraping (for weather content)
• Post expiration for breaking news/weather and cancellations
• Custom Admin Branding
• Picasa photo management and integration using Shashin
• Highly customized printing plugin for hard copies (important to a lot of readers who still print and share with friends with family)
• SuperCaching – too many queries on the homepage/sidebar to live without this
• Highly intelligent ad-serving framework built on Google Ad Manager
• Lots and lots of htaccess magic for feeds, past pages and to prevent deadlinks
We’ve also installed and had a lot of fun and success with the Analytics 360º tool from Crowd Favorite. Nice for contributors to see stats without needing to open the gates on the full analytics tool.
Checkout KNIA/KRLS at www.kniakrls.com to see it in action.
Previously