Building a Unified Content Platform for Global Newsrooms

Context

The Associated Press (AP) serves fifteen thousand media organizations across one hundred countries, delivering content in every major format: text, photos, graphics, audio, and video. Historically, each format lived in its own platform (AP Exchange, AP Images, AP Video Hub, AP Archive, and others). These tools reflected an era when newsrooms operated in strict silos.

As the industry evolved toward integrated, multi-format storytelling, customers increasingly needed a single place to search, preview, license, and download all AP content. Fragmented platforms created friction, slowed coverage during breaking news, and risked losing customers to competitors with more unified workflows.

I joined AP in 2008 and spent several years designing and improving these format-specific tools. That experience gave me a deep understanding of customer workflows. By 2014, I used this knowledge to help drive the experience strategy for Project Uno, AP’s multi-year transformation to unify all content types into one scalable platform.

Challenges

AP needed to unify a decade of fragmented systems without disrupting global customers who relied on editorial speed and accuracy. The transformation required:

• Integrating multiple business models (credits, subscriptions, ala carte purchases, and e-commerce) into a single coherent experience.

• Redesigning search to support multi-format content behavior during high-stakes news coverage.

• Supporting diverse workflows where some customers preferred advanced search and others depended on browsing and exploration.

• Unifying metadata across text, photo, and video, while addressing inconsistencies that made discovery unreliable.

• Ensuring compliance with regional licensing rules, especially for video, without creating friction for users.

This was a redesign of the entire content ecosystem, not a surface-level refresh.

My Role and Leadership

1. Building the case for a unified platform

To secure leadership alignment, I led a multi-country generative research effort across print, digital, and broadcast customers. This included interviews, surveys, workflow analysis, and metadata audits. The research revealed:

• Customers could not reliably find content across formats during breaking news, often turning to competitors within minutes.

• Search behavior differed widely across personas, requiring a flexible experience model.

• Metadata inconsistency caused major discoverability gaps, especially in video.

• Lack of mobile support limited productivity for modern newsrooms.

This customer research created urgency and secured leadership support for a unified platform.

2. Designing for scale across search, metadata, and content models

Search and metadata alignment: To support this initiative, AP had to migrate their search index to a modern search provide (Elastic Search). I deep dived into the capability of the new search engine and introduced things like event based and people based tagging across formats, giving customers a consistent way to explore stories as they evolved. I partnered with engineering and editorial data teams to ensure metadata supported both breaking news and archival search patterns. 

Unified business models: I designed workflows that brought together subscriptions, credits, ala carte purchases, and e-commerce processes into a single system. This allowed AP to scale its licensing operations without forcing customers through conflicting user flows.

Video-specific compliance and usability: Video content had geo-location and licensing restrictions. I worked with editorial and engineering teams to design compliance-aware workflows that preserved usability while meeting regional rules. This included restructuring preview, booking, and download experiences to reduce friction.

Browsing for non-search users: Many customers preferred browsing by event, category, or editorial curation. I developed flexible browsing models and visual organization patterns so the unified platform served both search-driven and browse-driven segments.

3. Enabling mobile-first and future-ready workflows

I designed AP’s first responsive design system, ensuring customers could search, preview, and download multi-format content across devices. This included building a pattern library that handled complex editorial and licensing scenarios.

I also led the design of AP’s editorial planning tool, giving customers early visibility into upcoming stories so they could prepare coverage and reduce operational challenges during major events.

4. Strengthening team capability and collaboration

To support a multi-year transformation, I invested in the UX team’s maturity:

• Mentored designers in research techniques so they could independently run qualitative and quantitative studies.

• Established an enterprise-wide customer research group to centralize insights and align priorities.

• Facilitated a communication workshop to reduce friction among cross-functional teams working on the initiative.

These investments improved alignment and reduced delivery risks across a complex program.

Impact

The unified platform fundamentally changed AP’s value proposition and customer experience. By 2019, the outcomes included:

• Sixty percent increase in average sessions, showing deeper customer engagement.

• Text story usage increased by fifty two percent, video downloads by twenty seven percent, and live video bookings by forty two percent.

• Photo downloads increased by twenty six percent, and curated content downloads increased by fifty four percent.

• Feature adoption increased by sixty four percent through guided user onboarding.

• Support calls decreased by twenty five percent, improving operational efficiency.

This transformation positioned AP as a modern, competitive provider of multi-format news at global scale, strengthening both customer loyalty and revenue potential.