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Associated Press Case Study - Media and Entertainment
Migrated 3.65 Million Stories to New CMS
The summary.
The Associated Press needed to migrate to a hosting solution that would populate social media platforms, mobile apps, and its website with news. We migrated content to the .NET framework from nearly 20 news sections and historical databases containing 3.65 million stories.
"The news business is fast-moving, complex, and ever-changing. From our very first meeting with the team at BairesDev, we were confident that we’d selected the best partner. They didn’t just come in and start re-coding our platform. Like our journalists, they asked probing questions that enabled us to identify our base needs and they created scalable solutions that help us better deliver news to the world."
Sr. Director, Business Technology, Associated PressAbout Associated Press
Associated Press (AP) was founded in 1846 and has a global reputation for independent, unbiased reporting of world events. They leverage a global network of journalists based in 94 countries. Four billion people consume AP journalism daily.
The challenge.
AP's news was hosted on a Classic ASP platform. Active Server Pages (ASP) was Microsoft's first server-side scripting language, released in 1996. ASP pulled scripts on a web server to customize websites. In 2002, the .NET framework was introduced to replace it. It leverages APIs to dynamically update web and mobile applications. Pew Research says that in the US 8/10 people access news via their web or mobile (rather than TV/radio), but half of U.S. adults get news at least sometimes from social media. AP needed to migrate to a solution that populated social media platforms, mobile apps, as well as their website.
A downside of working with legacy systems is a lack of uniform code updates and automated testing. Multiple generations of developers had made alterations at AP without clear controls regarding architecture, coding standards, and business rules. Most repositories lacked clear documentation. The .NET framework would set the tone for a well-documented platform. This would match AP's dedication to timely reporting by providing streamlined, omnichannel content delivery.
They needed to outsource development because of an internal resource shortage. The migration needed to occur simultaneously with uploading ongoing news content. We found vetted engineers to maintain the current platform while performing a seamless migration.
AP needed to migrate to a hosting solution that populated social media platforms, mobile apps, as well as their website. Updating from a Classic ASP platform to the .NET framework would set the tone for a well-documented platform.
The solution.
Within weeks, we assembled a team of vetted engineers to work on the migration. Once onboarded, our engineers mapped the formats and features media outlets required. We pinpointed Microsoft's.NET Framework as a solution that would make AP's platform more flexible, and scalable. It could also accommodate uploading 400,000 stories a year.
All technologies used.
The outcome.
Our engineers helped AP by:
- Migrating the content from nearly 20 news sections to the .NET framework.
- Migrating historic databases that held past stories for APs digitized archives dating from 1985. There were 3.65 million stories in total.
- Giving AP readers access to ∼40 million journalistic photographs and 2 million videos.
The migration affected AP's reader base of 1.5 million app users and their 6 social media channels with over 56 million followers.
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