Rheinische Post: Turning a legacy media outlet into a customer-centric digital news platform
About Rheinische Post
Rheinische Post Media Group is one of the five largest newspaper publishers in Germany in terms of circulation. Its news platform attracts 12 million monthly users and this is set to increase with a digital transformation strategy providing customized content.
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About adesso
adesso is a leading IT implementation provider for German-speaking companies.
Rheinische Post built a custom data warehouse that stores and analyzes substantial amounts of data to improve the customer experience and increase subscriptions.
Results
- Centralizing storage of all editorial content
- Enabling non-technical users to access customized datasets and analysis
- Crawling and storage of 5+ million datasets
- Facilitating data-informed decisions
- Increasing engagement and conversion rates for paid content
Increasing subscriptions by optimizing customer data
The way people get their daily dose of news has changed considerably in the last 20 years, with newspapers and other media outlets having to adapt to this constantly changing landscape. In a major shift, Deloitte reports audience data is now a priority for media companies and plays a vital role in driving growth and revenue. Readers want content more relevant to their interests, while advertisers want greater insights into user behavior. To satisfy both needs, media companies are making data-driven decisions on everything from interfaces to the stories they cover.
Transitioning from a traditional news business to a technology company
Rheinische Post, founded in 1946, and one of Germany’s largest regional newspaper publishers, is embracing these trends with a digital transformation plan that puts customers at the center of its strategy. The media group owns several titles and online sites and employs 3,000 people in Germany and abroad.
Tobias Block, Director of Data Systems and Intelligence at Rheinische Post is leading the initiative. “Our goal is to move from a legacy newspaper business to a digital subscription-based news service. We call it data-driven product development, data-driven growth, and data-informed journalism.”
The wider strategic principle for Rheinische Post is focused on changing the business model of the organization from an old-school daily newspaper into one that’s organized around engaged digital users and subscribers, rather than advertising revenues only. The goal, Block says, is to become a customer-centered company. The process began with the migration of all its content from on-premises servers to the cloud.
“We need to store and analyze a lot of data to improve the customer experience and increase subscriptions. We chose Google Cloud because it’s an easy solution and works well with all the Google tools we use, unlike other big platforms where you need experts to do even small tasks.”
—Tobias Block, Director of Data Systems & Intelligence, Rheinische PostEnabling fast, easy data migration and integration with BigQuery
Rheinische Post started working with Google Cloud in January 2021, when it migrated more than 5 million news articles to the platform. Utilizing BigQuery, it integrated 15 data sources, including Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, and Google Ad Manager.
Block says the decision to choose Google was based on speed, integration, and ease of use across all divisions of the media company. “We need to store and analyze a lot of data to improve the customer experience and increase subscriptions. We chose Google Cloud because it’s an easy solution and works well with all the Google tools we use, unlike other big platforms where you need experts to do even small tasks.”
Rheinische Post teamed up with Google partner adesso to accelerate its migration to the Google Cloud. And, adesso continues to support Rheinische Post to achieve its goals with a focus on data and architecture.
Migrating to a cloud warehouse and building large data dashboards can be a slow process for a traditional business. The benefit of working with Google Cloud, Block says, was the fast pace. “It's easy to build large data dashboards, but we wanted to do it in weeks, instead of months. And we are really happy with how quick the process was.”
Delivering revenue-building insights with Looker
Rheinische Post uses BigQuery scheduling features for KPIs, modeling, and insights and BigQuery and Looker are at the heart of the business’s digital transformation. Looker is a critical tool for achieving one of Rheinische Post’s primary goals; understanding more about its readers, providing relevant content and experiences, while also using consumer behavior to drive editorial decisions.
Making these insights visible to journalists used to be a lengthy and cumbersome process. But, newsroom staff now have their own simplified and personalized dashboards powered by Looker, providing data about their stories. “The personalized dashboard we get with Looker is something we never had before and it's really easy to use,” says Block. “Editorial staff can see insights about their work in real-time, rather than waiting a long time for someone else to pull the data.” Now, more than 5 million datasets are crawled and stored, delivering live data to dashboards allowing journalists and other stakeholders to view information about engagement and traffic in real-time.
A suite of Google Cloud solutions powers data strategy
Rheinische Post uses a host of other Google Cloud Solutions to manage and execute data functions, including Google Cloud Tasks in combination with Cloud Functions for BigQuery data ingestion, Cloud Storage and Cloud Scheduler. These four solutions, Block says, are complementary and excel at the management of large workloads. The business will use Cloud CDN when it moves its website to Google Cloud, along with Cloud SQL.
Compute Engine works in combination with App Engine as a microservice for Rheinische Post’s data, as well as the landing page for the editorial team. And Block says Data Analytics is one of the most valuable parts included in Google Analytics 360; it’s connected to BigQuery as one of its main data sources. Apigee is also instrumental in building an integration hub for Rheinische Post’s APIs across all of its systems as part of a plan to make visible the geographical locations of stories. Firestore is being deployed to configure data within news articles for storage, once they’ve been recorded.
Block explains Vertex AI and NLP API are boost technologies his team uses for content tagging. “We send our content and it automatically tags and classifies and categorizes it as an NLP. We extract entities from the text and store them also in the FireStore. The entity extraction is the next phase.
“We will unify all our customer data platforms in the future and with Apigee, we will also have a central point for every API and piece of data. The API will interface with applications and software-defined data, this will enable a special project we will launch, called Lighthouse.”
“The personalized dashboard we get with Looker is something we never had before and it's really easy to use. Editorial staff can see insights about their work in real-time, rather than waiting a long time for someone else to pull the data.”
—Tobias Block, Director of Data Systems & Intelligence, Rheinische PostCreating hyper-local news driven by data
Lighthouse will focus on a hyperlocal view of news content, using geocoding methods to extract specific event locations to tag articles on a map, enabling users to dig deep into topics of interest. Block believes this level of customization will increase engagement and conversion rates for paid content. “People want comprehensive news and information about their local areas and we have to continue to be the authority for them with local or national news. Providing local clusters with local knowledge, with GPS-enabled maps indicating where and what is happening in their areas will be a valuable tool to accomplish this.” The first phase has been implemented with the initial insights being shared with editorial teams.
Increased engagement and subscription rates
Extracting greater user data is the next step for Rheinische Post Mediengruppe, with a goal of customer retention and increasing digital subscribers to approximately 250,000 by 2026. Block and his team continue to build on the Google Cloud Platform. They are well on their way to delivering product personalization step-by-step, from the newsroom to the marketing team. Google Cloud has been a critical part of this process, Block concludes. “Google Cloud has impacted every stage of the business. It’s just the start of our digital transformation as we enlist other Google Cloud products to achieve greater product personalization for our users as a mechanism for driving growth.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Rheinische Post
Rheinische Post Media Group is one of the five largest newspaper publishers in Germany in terms of circulation. Its news platform attracts 12 million monthly users and this is set to increase with a digital transformation strategy providing customized content.
About adesso
adesso is a leading IT implementation provider for German-speaking companies.