Complete Story
03/16/2017
Tronc's adoption of Washington Post's Arc platform doubly important
This week in Austin, Texas, at the zoo that the South by Southwest Interactive Festival can be, Washington Post Chief Information Officer Shailesh Prakash entertained a few of the digital animals. Prakash, the Post's executive in charge of both product and technology, highlighted his pet project, Arc Publishing, in his Tuesday "Predicting the Future of News" keynote.
Arc serves as the foundation for the reborn Washington Post's very digital-first publishing business. The platform, first developed in 2010, has helped drive the Post's astounding audience growth, maximizing the value of its expanding content to propel it from 50 million to about 100 million unique visitors in the space of two years. That's the potential power of Arc. It's a force multiplier for news publishers aiming to wring more value from the content they produce.
The Arc story is significant, one answer to the question of how legacy news companies can harness the best tools of internet creation, distribution and sharing, like the newcomers such as BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Vice have shown themselves able to do.
Today, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on publishing technology, many publishers' news tech looks like a digital tower, or stack, of Babel. Legacy content production suppliers such as DTI and CCC have built out their digital capabilities atop legacy tech. WordPress and Adobe (ADBE) have become more of a standard among some publishers. And many companies, like Tronc (TRNC) have devoted countless resources of time and money to building, rebuilding and adding onto to their own proprietary systems.
