Salzburger Nachrichten
Salzburger Nachrichten's new digital news hub: All formats, one app
1. The challenge: Bringing it all together
In 2023, Salzburger Nachrichten’s ePaper system had reached its end-of-life. The Austrian publishing house was in the process of revitalising its digital presence and, in addition to finding a newer and more robust ePaper, wanted to add content formats like podcasts, narrative articles, video, and live news to its journalistic products.
Salzburger Nachrichten had upgraded its website and needed a robust mobile counterpart: a modern app that could be fully customised with Salzburger Nachrichten’s content while also providing direct contact and communication with subscribers.
“As part of our evaluation of possible providers, we included Vitec Visiolink,” says Thomas Hofbauer, Managing Editor and Project Owner at Salzburger Nachrichten. “Vitec Visiolink had very good references in the business and were convincing with their expertise in the area of digital publishing.”
2. The solution: Unified yet versatile content
Bringing multiple forms of content into one place and integrating media from a number of editorial systems in a single app was a key to upping its digital game, Hofbauer explains, which is why the choice ultimately fell on Vitec Visiolink’s Modular Platform.
“Our Modular Platform is highly customisable by design and capable of integrating multiple evolving content formats into a single app,” says Senior Business Developer at Vitec Visiolink, Peter Nielsen. “Videos, podcasts, and an enhanced ePaper can all cross reference one another within the app in ways that link stories together to create more appealing editorial and advertising possibilities.”
Modular Platform treats different content types as separate ‘universes’ that can link to one another. This meant that the Salzburger Nachrichten’s journalists could use each format to its fullest and combine them to cover stories even more compellingly.
“At the same time, functionality like push messages and CTA buttons open the possibility for direct, customised communication with subscribers which can be appealing and relevant for Salzburger Nachrichten itself and its advertisers,” says Nielsen.
The solution promised not only to streamline content management and distribution, but also to significantly improve the user experience with a modern, intuitive interface that could lead to greater reader engagement and potentially an increase in digital subscriptions.
3. The implementation: A strong team and ambitious timeline
In 2023, Salzburger Nachrichten entered a partnership with Vitec Visiolink and had assembled a cross-disciplinary internal team to begin defining the project’s scope and specifications.
“Luckily there were no real hurdles because the project was very well prepared,” Thomas Hofbauer says. “The platform is actually self-explanatory and Vitec Visiolink was always a competent contact during the implementation phase.”
Despite the ambitious nature of the project and the technical challenges of integrating a completely new platform into the Salzburger Nachrichten editorial flow, the project team maintained focus on stability and functionality. Vitec Visiolink’s Web App ePaper solution was introduced first and Salzburger Nachtrichten’s other channels were added to the Modular Platform app to unify all content in one place.
“They were in a good position to do that because they had decided to scrap the old ePaper solution and integrate ours. So it was not like they were transitioning, they were starting from scratch and we were ready to help with that,” he says.
4. The results: A digital publishing solution to grow with
Since early 2024, Modular Platform has helped Salzburger Nachrichten bring its news, podcasts, ePaper and Digital Archive, real-estate listings, and job ads into a single app so subscribers have full access to mobile content.
Other features like text-to-speech are being implemented on a running basis.
Hofbauer says the launch of the new SN app, built on Modular Platform, has helped Salzburger Nachrichten take a leap towards its goal of increasing reader engagement and growing subscriptions. The project has affected every aspect of the company, he says, and there are plans to continue expanding the platform to adequately present all of SN’s multimedia capabilities in the future.
The initial response from subscribers?
“Very good,” Hofbauer says.
Carsten Bedsted, Chief Commercial Officer at Vitec Visiolink, explains that Modular Platform can both improve reader experience and help tame backend IT concerns and expenses.
“Basically, Modular Platform is an industrial strength SaaS platform that provides the typical benefits of SaaS - things like ongoing upgrades and improvements, patches and less administration. This makes it easy and fast to scale based on a publisher’s exact needs and is what we will continue to work with Salzburger Nachrichten to achieve.”