Digital News Experience: Empowering Small Newsrooms at Global Scale

Context

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 Challenge

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.

My Role and Leadership

Phase 1: New Product Initiative for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics

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.

Phase 2: Continuous Expansion and Innovation

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.

Impact

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

Reflection

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.