News Corp Australia is Australia’s largest media company. Each month, over 7 million Australians consume news and information from the publisher’s digital brands.

News Corp Australia operates 170 newspaper and magazine titles, which is nearly three-quarters of all daily metropolitan newspaper circulation in Australia. Together, these channels form the country’s biggest mobile news network, which also includes an extensive portfolio of mobile and tablet apps.

WordPress VIP has partnered with News Corp Australia since the media giant undertook a migration of all its properties to WordPress and the WordPress VIP managed platform. Today, WordPress VIP supports over 40 sites for News Corp Australia, including flagship brands like The Australian, News.com.au, Vogue.com.au, and The Daily Telegraph. This case study documents the story of that initial migration, led by agency partner XWP.

Multiple platforms hampered growth

News Corp Australia was grappling with ongoing development, maintenance, and administration challenges related to their existing publishing platforms.

With more than 90 major news, sports, business, and lifestyle brands spread across a wide range of platforms, their team suffered from inefficient workflows which hindered their growth. To position themselves for continued success, they needed a flexible, enterprise-level content platform with the power to scale.

“Some of our goals with the migration were to improve workflow efficiencies, empower site producers to make changes with a full preview of their impact, and cut the time it takes to build out a section of the site from days to hours.”

Weston Ruter, CTO, XWP

A clear path to publishing

WordPress VIP worked with partner agency XWP on a yearlong migration of 15 major web properties to WordPress.

To bring all the brands to a single platform, XWP simplified the sites’ overall anatomy by consolidating several markup languages from the existing web properties into a single structure. This consolidation improved the sites’ performance and shortened the learning curve for News Corp Australia’s internal development team.

Incorporating a core suite of trusted plugins and custom publishing tools deepened the production team’s capability to create, without having to call on IT for technical support. This enhanced editorial workflow not only made the publishing process smoother but significantly reduced operational expenses.

The results

As a result of the migration and replatforming, the organization gained:

• 40x improvement in time to publish.
• An agile platform that integrates seamlessly with internal systems.
• A dramatic reduction in the time and cost required to update each web property.
• Ability to better serve both its readers and advertisers.

Since launching with WordPress VIP, News Corp Australia has continued to grow their digital offerings, now hosting 40+ sites with WordPress VIP, and launching new assets on a regular basis.

They take advantage of over 50 custom plugins, which integrate WordPress with their broader systems architecture. They’ve built a highly skilled team of in-house developers who work closely with WordPress VIP every day to maintain and advance their content platform in the ever-changing and evolving enterprise WordPress ecosystem.

In many ways, this project allowed News Corp Australia to reinvent themselves and established a partnership to drive the evolution of the platform for years to come.