The Digital News Experience (DNE) program began in 2009 as a bold initiative by the Associated Press to help small and mid-sized news organizations compete during major global events. These organizations lacked the infrastructure, staff capacity, and digital platforms to cover high-demand events like the Olympics or the World Cup.
AP saw an opportunity to change this dynamic by creating a white label digital experience that local publishers could instantly deploy, generate ad revenue from, and use to strengthen their audience engagement.
I joined the core team during the program’s inception and went on to guide its evolution for nearly a decade, helping transform it from a six-month experiment into one of AP’s most successful digital offerings.
The program launched under intense constraints:
Customer need: Small newsrooms could not produce or monetize high-profile event coverage.
Organizational shift: AP, historically B2B, had to pivot into direct-to-consumer digital products.
Timeline pressure: We had only six months to conceptualize, design, and ship the first iteration in time for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Scale: Hundreds of news organizations needed onboarding with no self-service tools.
We had to create a scalable, revenue-generating experience for thousands of publishers while building entirely new digital muscles within AP.
I served on the founding product design team and helped bring the first version of DNE to life under extreme ambiguity and compressed timelines.
My contributions included:
Information architecture: Designed a flexible structure built on AP’s deep sports taxonomy, enabling dynamic experiences by event, athlete, country, stats, and story type.
Content strategy and prioritization: Defined the essential features required to launch within six months while maintaining a high-quality user experience.
Rapid iteration and validation: Conducted competitive analysis and tested designs internally with sports enthusiasts to ensure we delivered an engaging experience.
Close engineering partnership: Navigated feasibility issues around multimedia, stats ingestion, and template rendering, adjusting the experience to ensure a successful launch.
White label customization: Created lightweight branding controls (logo, colors, templates) that allowed local newsrooms to deploy quickly without technical support.
Manual publisher onboarding: Since self-service tooling did not yet exist, I supported a highly manual onboarding process for hundreds of customers.
Despite the constraints, the platform launched on schedule for the 2010 Winter Olympics and exceeded expectations, validating the long-term potential of DNE.
Following the Vancouver success, I continued to lead major expansions of the platform for almost a decade.
Key contributions included:
Self-service management tools: Designed interfaces that allowed publishers to customize branding, manage content, configure ad placements, and view analytics without AP intervention.
Responsive design transformation: Modernized the platform to be fully responsive, driving mobile engagement to more than eighty percent of total traffic.
Richer storytelling: Introduced enhanced multimedia features, enabling customers to deliver more visual and immersive experiences.
Event expansion: Helped scale DNE to large global events including the Summer Olympics, the World Cup, NASCAR, and major political events.
Personalization and engagement: Leveraged AP’s taxonomy to create deeper personalization, resulting in significant increases in user engagement and returning visitor rates.
Large scale migration: Led the UX for a migration initiative that moved more than 3,000 customers from an outdated hosting platform into DNE, resolving a challenge AP had struggled with for a decade.
The Digital News Experience program became one of AP’s most impactful digital initiatives:
Adopted by over 3,000 news organizations worldwide
Delivered over 1 billion annual page views at its peak
Grew from 10 million views during the Vancouver Olympics to massive, year-round engagement
Increased story consumption from 1.4 per visit to 3.8 per visit
Generated millions of dollars in new revenue for AP and its partners
Won the AP Chairman Prize for Innovation
Enabled small publishers to cover global events at a standard previously impossible without significant investment
This program shaped my approach to platform design, large-scale content systems, and long-term product evolution. It taught me how to build for scale, design within extreme constraints, and guide a product from a rapid prototype to an enduring, high-value solution used by thousands of organizations.
More importantly, it reinforced the impact of thoughtful UX leadership in empowering customers who would otherwise be left out of major global conversations.
Fig 1: Performance metrics of Digital News Experience
Fig 2: College Football Home Page
Fig 3: Photo Feed Page
Fig 4: AP Top 25 Poll
Fig 5: Olympics Medal Page
Fig 6: Mobile Photo Feed and Topic Page
Fig 7: Mobile article page and Football Schedule page
Fig 8: Embeddable widgets