MSNBC Blog sites meet the demand of more than a billion page views a month with Telligent’s flexible and scalable Community Server platform
The watercooler has been replaced. The Web is now the popular spot for discussions around breaking news and the latest trends. For news organizations it is no longer enough to provide scheduled reporting and analysis; the public now expects news to be reported as it’s happening -- and to have a forum to respond and to discuss what’s happening.
At MSNBC, news and insight on news events from NBC anchors, news correspondents and producers are shared on a number of blogs. These online entries provide a dynamic look at world events and trends as they are happening.
As the 2006 mid-term elections approached, site managers at MSNBC knew their already-popular blogs, The Daily Nightly and First Read, would be in high demand. There was concern whether the current platform could deliver mission-critical levels of uptime in very high-traffic situations.
“When news is your business, downtime in unacceptable,” says Hans Bjordahl, group manager responsible for MSNBC’s Web site. “We needed a platform that would scale and keep pace with our blog growth.”
MSNBC began looking for a new blog platform that would ensure that site visitors could quickly and easily find what they wanted on demand, as well as provide MSNBC editors and writers easy-to-use basic blog functions -- such as posts, comments and trackbacks. MSNBC’s site is built on a Microsoft platform, so .Net compatibility was a key requirement, as were scalability, stability and high availability. As an intrinsic part of the MSNBC brand, blogs must also fit into the news network’s workflow and signature look. Thorough, comprehensive reporting was also essential.
The MSNBC team chose Telligent’s Community Server™, a secure online collaboration application that uniquely provides integrated multi-user blogging, forums, file sharing, video-casting, podcasting and photo sharing.
“Community Server enables us to set up blogs quickly, as well as to put in key customizations suited to our editors’ workflow,” such as custom graphics and the ability to review entire reader comments in an easy-to-read preview mode, Bjordahl says.
The application was first implemented successfully for Cosmic Log, a science-oriented blog. The real proving ground came on election night, November 7, 2006, when the First Read blog -- which provides analysis of the day’s political news -- handled 90 posts from NBC political analysts, more than 1,500 unique visitor comments and a million page views in a single day.
“People on election night went to the First Read blog for breaking news, and then segued to the regular site for analysis,” Bjordahl explains. “The election night traffic on First Read blew everyone’s expectations away.”
Since then MSNBC has ported many of its existing blogs -- as well as new blogs -- to the Telligent platform. Many of the blogs are experiencing increases in activity on the new platform.
With concerns about stability out of the way, Bjordahl and his team can now devote their resources to expanding the visitor experience. “IT is no longer involved in creating blogs, which is great for us,” added Bjordahl. “We pretty much handed the management of the blogs over to the design teams to drive it. IT continues to add enhancements, such as making it even easier for editors to drag photos and video right from the MSNBC database into the blog.
“Working with Telligent we customized the editor’s interface so that artwork could be accessed from our existing database; it eliminated the need to maintain and track a separate set of photographic assets. It also cut down a few steps for our time-crunched editors. With Community Server we were also able to customize our blog templates to match our branding initiatives.
“We want to create reasons for people to visit MSNBC one time an hour, not one time a day,” says Bjordahl. “The ability to break news into blog-size pieces, with the ability for the public and reporters to comment and reply, creates a beneficial loop of activity.”
“Blogs are must-haves for a news Web site,” says Bjordahl. “It’s just a different way of reporting and presenting information that streams in over the course of the day, rather than reporting in chunks at the beginning or end of the day.
“Going outside to Telligent to put our blog platform in place was definitely the right decision for us. They provide a complete turn-key solution, plus have a great support team. With Community Server we are creating an experience where people want to visit our site often.”
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