Accelerating innovation across dozens of newsrooms, including a handful of big-swinging major metros, is challenging even on the best days. Daily local journalism moves fast, and most new initiatives meet a painful end after getting pulverised in a grinder of hardened workflows, tight schedules, and unrelenting deadlines. 

While our teams at Hearst Newspapers (HNP) still have much work to do to grow and super-serve our audiences, we’ve hit on a successful innovation strategy with our Click-2-Publish (C2P) programme. The suite of two dozen self-service tools and templates allows journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and our other local newsrooms to publish interactive projects and visually driven stories that go beyond the typical article layout — without needing to write a single line of code.

Inside the strategy

The purpose of the C2P programme is simple: to make it easier for newsrooms to publish innovative, interactive journalism. Serving this need has become a pillar of the Hearst DevHub, a team of a dozen journalist-developers and content strategists who collaborate with newsrooms to conceive, build, and publish interactive projects, news apps, internal tools, and storytelling templates that reinforce local journalism’s value. 

Over the past few years, the C2P programme has helped define HNP’s overall content strategy and provided a growth path for newsrooms of all sizes. We have stronger working relationships with reporters, editors, producers, visual editors, audience specialists, and leadership across our markets. 

The template suite spans a range of storytelling types. These include:

• Top List: A flexible template that allows newsrooms to build utility programmes, such as SFChronicle’s Top Restaurants programme of 60 guides covering 850 restaurants or the (Albany) Times Union’s statehouse legislation tracker.
• Community Vote: A reader-voting integration built for Athlete of the Week programmes across our hyperlocal sites, yet flexible enough for other uses.
• Map scroller: An interactive template that leads readers through a graphics experience.
• Assignment Editor: A survey tool that lets readers send feedback on specific topics and helps newsrooms create feedback loops.
• Best Day Ever: A lively local travel template that takes readers through a neighbourhood, city, or region.

Outside the newsroom

It’s not only journalists who have embraced the C2P programme. Using these templates to evolve newsroom priorities has been invaluable as the company aligns its editorial, product, and marketing strategies without abandoning high standards of quality for our journalism. 

The programme has allowed marketing teams and newsrooms to collaborate on initiatives that are fun (e.g., a multi-week reader vote to name San Francisco’s “official” animal) and important (e.g., comprehensive voter guides across Hearst markets). This culture change has made HNP stronger and better built for the future, especially as we double down on a consumer-focused model. 

Measuring the results

Since the launch of the C2P programme by the DevHub in 2022, and through its infrastructure overhaul in 2023 and early 2024, our newsrooms have seen a 225% increase in interactive project production. These projects now number in the hundreds each quarter across our network and are driving more audience engagement and bottom-line results week after week. 

DevHub and C2P projects have seen sharp increases across our editorial KPIs. In 2023 DevHub/C2P projects saw:

• An average of 304% more visits than the average staff story.
• An average of 477% more subscriber visits than the average staff story.
• An average of 1,081% more subscription influences, measured by visits in the seven days before a user subscribes, than the average staff story. 

The programme’s success has led HNP to more innovative content strategies, faster newsroom transformation, stronger cross-team collaboration, and better bottom-line results. 

The C2P programme’s most gratifying result, however, isn’t any one metric or project; it’s seeing these interactives inspire the next innovative idea for our local journalists and the communities they cover.

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