"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 Strategical Analysis at Amedia.

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 straightforward: 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 helps us develop and tweak our content to deliver what readers appreciate—definitely not to be confused with clickbait-journalism," Pål Nedregotten underscores.

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," Pål Nedregotten explains.

"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," he adds.

Amedia chose CUE as the successor to the 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," Pål Nedregotten says.

"We have taken a step into the modern world. Much of the rigidity of the old system—and a lot of the tech-dependencies—are history. 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—e.g. automatic classification and tag suggestions, as well as a host of other, future integrations—a sore spot in the old system,” he says.