Australian Community Media (ACM) is Australia’s largest publisher of regional and agricultural news. ACM is embarking on a multi-year digital transformation to enhance audience reach and streamline newsroom efforts. During planning, Editorial and Audience research identified that the additional workload of training staff and the effort required for crafting SEO headlines and meta descriptions proved difficult, impacting our ability to capture reader attention during breaking news events and resulting in subpar SEO performance on Google. Furthermore, The articles were not optimised for digital storytelling and mobile viewing, as the focus remained on desktop displays despite most of our audience accessing content via mobile. Additionally, the recirculation rate for internal links was suboptimal, requiring significant time and effort from newsrooms to add related links.

To increase the value proposition of a paid digital subscription, ACM decided to invest in their Newsrooms with CMS features like AI-assisted SEO Headlines, Realtime Digital Checklist to optimise Story digital formatting, Live Story mobile preview while authoring stories and AI-generated Personalised Content recommendations to improve recirculation rate within the Mastheads for their Audience and many other enhancements.