Die Presse: Empowering journalism with next-gen data solutions
About Die Presse
Founded in 1848, Die Presse is a German-language newspaper of record in Austria. Die Presse focuses on creating and curating quality journalism to keep its readership informed.
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About Aliz
Aliz, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, specializes in digital transformation and IT future-proofing through data, machine learning, and infrastructure solutions and support.
Die Presse uses Google Cloud solutions along with data science and engineering support from partner Aliz to accelerate story and product development, build readership, and further digital transformation.
Google Cloud results
- De-siloes data for better access, value, and use by journalists and business teams
- Reduces transcription times 3-fold through cloud-based automated services, accelerating time to story publication
- Lowers overall cost of data management with a modernized data lake
Democratizes data
As more people get their news digitally, media companies are quickly establishing multiple channels to reach audiences locally, nationally, and globally. Some of the world’s longest-running newspapers are thriving today thanks in part to a commitment to digital transformation. And they’re doing so while looking to maintain the outstanding journalism that enabled them to build credibility and win readers over the years.
Die Presse has kept Austrians informed with high-quality journalism since 1848. More recently, Die Presse has undergone a massive digital transformation to better deliver the experiences that today’s readers expect. Critical to accomplishing Die Presse’s goals is adopting modern technologies that give the newspaper’s extended team of journalists and business staff quick access to all tools they need to deliver superior up-to-date news and services to readers everywhere.
"We believe in journalism’s value to society and are committed to delivering unmatched information and services." says Stefan Körner, Chief Operating Officer at Die Presse. "Our digital transformation focuses on continuing our tradition of journalistic excellence, while giving us more ways to monetize our services. We recognize that adopting advanced analytics and other modern tools will help us get there."
Die Presse chose to support its digital transformation with the help of Google Cloud and partner Aliz.
"Without Aliz, we wouldn’t have been able to implement several essential capabilities, including gaining accurate customer segmentations, that transform how we reach and stay engaged with readers."
—Stefan Körner, Chief Operating Officer, Die PresseImproving data management, accessibility, and value
Die Presse first engaged with Aliz and Google Cloud to overcome challenges it faced managing a huge volume of data from many sources. The newspaper had overly siloed databases that made it difficult to access and capitalize on information. Underlying technology infrastructure was slow to react to the company’s needs, and Die Presse needed a more modernized data lake to achieve its digital transformation goals.
The company chose to migrate on-prem data to BigQuery, which would act as the central repository for information spanning back decades as well as new data going forward. Aliz and Google Cloud helped Die Presse take a well-planned approach to the migration, mapping out each element and taking a step-by-step approach to project management.
"We had to drill down into specific use cases and manage each migration carefully," says Stefan. "Google Cloud helped us build the data lake we needed and continue to support us as we progress through our digital transformation."
Aliz provided the technical support to maximize the immediate benefits of the new data infrastructure. Die Presse worked with Aliz to create a recommendation system and establish sophisticated customer segmentation processes to cover everything from reading preferences to purchasing propensity.
The partner is continuing to help Die Presse gain more value out of its data through the implementation of machine learning tools to tag articles moving through the data repository and ramping up transcription services.
"With Aliz, I truly felt Die Presse was at the center of the process and they really understood our challenges," says Stefan. "They’ve been very open and collaborative. I never would have thought that we would come this far so quickly."
Empowering journalists with modern data tools
Die Presse built its digital transformation on the best possible technologies to power both key internal business processes and support a modern workforce of journalists. Along with its enhanced data infrastructure, the newspaper also began using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other Google Cloud solutions to reimagine its previously monolithic infrastructure into more agile, efficient systems.
"Google Cloud improves how we work from both an infrastructure and systems perspective. We can quickly gather, access, and use data more effectively with capabilities supported by machine learning and other technologies," says Stefan. "Our IT stack has become much more flexible since moving to Google Cloud solutions."
Aliz stepped in to help Die Presse get the most out of its new infrastructure by putting more powerful data insights into journalists’, as well as business staff’s, hands. Through data engineering, machine learning, and data science support, Die Presse accelerated the time to value of its digital transformation, while gaining more expertise in taking advantage of all capabilities in the Google Cloud solutions.
"Without Aliz, we wouldn’t have been able to implement several essential capabilities, including gaining accurate customer segmentations, that transform how we reach and stay engaged with readers," says Stefan. "We also rely on Aliz for other projects, but thanks to their commitment to educating us, we also handle projects on our own. They helped us quickly strengthen our foundation for working in the cloud."
Die Presse’s staff can now rapidly access data on a range of topics related to the stories they’re working on. Thanks to the less hands-on nature of cloud infrastructure management, IT staff is now also more responsive to all staff, further accelerating story creation, publishing and rollout of new services.
For busy journalists, Die Presse also benefits from ML and other Google Cloud capabilities to accelerate transcribing interviews.
"Our work with Google Cloud and Aliz has opened up many new possibilities in how we use IT to enable our journalists and business teams to work better and faster," says Stefan. "The new opportunities to leverage data allows us to adopt new strategies that boost efficiency and speed while maintaining our same high standards of journalism."
"Our work with Google Cloud and Aliz has opened up many new possibilities in how we can use IT to enable our journalists and business teams to work better and faster."
—Stefan Körner, Chief Operating Officer, Die PresseTechnology as an enabler, not a roadblock
Die Presse continues to move along in its transformation, expanding the reach of its new capabilities to other departments. Sales staff now have better access to accurate subscriber and advertiser data points, while product and marketing teams take advantage of market data insights to inform customer outreach and engagement strategies.
"Google Cloud and Aliz introduced us to a cloud-based, state-of-the-art environment that is straightforward to manage and use," says Stefan. "This frees staff to focus more on outstanding journalism and delivering innovative new services."
Looking ahead, Die Presse will continue building on its successes by investing more into quality journalism in ways that directly benefit its readers. With certain industry challenges on the horizon, Die Presse is educating readers on the importance of quality, transparent approaches to storytelling.
"This is just the beginning of the real impact that more modern IT and data solutions will have on journalism and the media industry," says Stefan. "We’ve seen several areas of improvement since our focus on digital transformation started. Our revenue is up, and we’re empowering our journalists to reach even more people with the best possible stories."
"We’ve seen several areas of improvement since our move to Google Cloud and collaboration with Aliz. We’ve empowered our journalists and staff with better tools to create even better stories and value for our readers and customers."
—Stefan Körner, Chief Operating Officer, Die PresseTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Die Presse
Founded in 1848, Die Presse is a German-language newspaper of record in Austria. Die Presse focuses on creating and curating quality journalism to keep its readership informed.
About Aliz
Aliz, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, specializes in digital transformation and IT future-proofing through data, machine learning, and infrastructure solutions and support.