New Media Investment Group: Helping Local Newspapers Report

Background

From changing reader habits to shifting ad revenue, the media industry has faced many recent challenges. But for New Media Investment Group, the company is reshaping the story by prioritizing growth and focusing on investing in local journalism. New Media is the largest owner of daily newspapers in the United States, reaching millions of readers every day.

Acquisitions have been a major contributor to New Media’s growth, but they have also presented unique operating challenges. For many of the regional newspapers acquired by New Media, each newsroom typically had its own suite of work, sales, and communication applications.

To address the challenges, New Media looked to adopt a standard, cloud-based set of productivity tools that could be easily deployed at existing and new locations. Working with Google Cloud Partners Prodoscore and UpCurve Cloud, New Media adopted G Suite as the company’s standard for collaborating and communicating in the cloud.

Results

Increase Collaboration 10X Across Company

New Media looked to adopt a standard, cloud-based set of productivity tools that could be easily deployed at existing and new locations. Working with Google Cloud Partners Prodoscore and UpCurve Cloud, New Media adopted G Suite as the company’s standard for collaborating and communicating in the cloud. Since migrating to G Suite, New Media has seen efficiency gains across its newsroom, production, and sales teams that further boost the quality of journalism offered to readers nationwide. They also replaced legacy work and production software with Google API-enabled cloud services for easier data extraction and custom reporting.

Improved Onboarding Practices for New Acquisitions

G Suite brought consistency and control to manage the highly dispersed operations. From newsrooms to sales offices,
G Suite has become the primary productivity solution for New Media. Products including Docs and Gmail are used for daily work and communication by over 9,000 employees. With G Suite cloud collaboration, editors and reporters can easily work together on stories. Gmail also provides a single email solution for all New Media papers and reduces the time spent on email platform management. Instead of having to navigate multiple productivity solutions, New Media IT can perform administrative tasks such as employee onboarding or pushing updates quickly and at scale.

Streamlined IT for Efficiency

When it first migrated to G Suite, New Media knew that it needed a better way to set up its journalists, sales, and office staff for success in their daily work. At the same time, the company needed to strike a balance between allowing its outlets to work independently while finding a cost-effective way to unite its IT infrastructure. With G Suite, New Media has a unified productivity platform that reduces IT management workloads, boosts employee collaboration, and helps improve the quality of work done by local papers.