How can new technology unleash the power of publishers’ archives?

28.04.2021 · By Camilla Allen

New initiatives are paving the way for media companies to harness the power of their content archives through advanced journalism tools — a tremendous opportunity to leverage existing value-rich material and drive new readership.

“Evergreen content is appealing to readers if resurfaced in a way that is smart.” — an internal New York Times report.

Publishers who fail to tap into the value held by years worth of carefully crafted content are quickly realising that this is a large opportunity to drive revenue and increase readership that is all too often overlooked.

It’s one of the big advantages legacy publishers have over digital upstarts: access to years of high-quality content — content that can be resurfaced or repackaged and sold to both readers and advertisers.

It’s clear that quality content has the potential for a life long past its publish date. For example, a full 20 percent of the digital single copy sales of The Economist have in fact been archival issues. While the Atlantic Weekly app, a roundup of The Atlantic’s top stories from the week, includes a story from its 157-year-old archives every time.

“It’s the wonderful thing about the digital environment, that these [articles] get new life,” says James Bennet, co-president of The Atlantic in an effort to make the brand’s content work as hard as it possibly can.

So, as publishers like The Atlantic grow and evolve in a digital-first world, it’s very apparent that harnessing the value of past content is a tactic they simply can’t afford to ignore.

But many content archives are extensive with ineffective tagging and unclear categorisation. Being able to access relevant content fast is the key, but journalists are sifting through extensive content backlogs and Googling past articles published by their brand in order to surface related content — a laborious, manual task that is draining publishers’ resources and time that could be funneled into producing fresh content.

A supercharged workflow

Fortunately, new technological developments are speeding up this task, enabling journalists to pinpoint related content in a matter of seconds to both enrich new articles and highlight evergreen content that has the potential to be reworked and republished in order to drive new traffic to a publisher’s site.

These new tools available are transforming “frozen” archives into active repositories of information which can be quickly scanned in order to glean fresh insights to guide and speed up the content-production process, enrich new content and boost search engine optimisation (SEO) through highly relevant internal linking.

For instance, our archive tool for publishers and journalists is the first journalism tool to enable one-click access to website archives as journalists write within a Google Doc. The aim being that journalists can scan extensive archives from their publisher without the risk of missing related articles and linking opportunities.

Using the power of machine learning (ML) the Google Chrome extension surfaces value-rich past content that relates to the article being worked on within their document and displays this content down the side of their piece, ready to easily scan for insights and embed links into their work with the click of a button.

“This is an exciting time for journalists and publishers,” says Ben Martin, fellow Director and Co-founder of LOYAL. “With Reuters Institute identifying that over two-thirds of publishers see artificial intelligence as the biggest enabler for journalism over the next few years, we’re delighted to apply the power of this technology to boost their capabilities and drive significant efficiencies.”

By embracing new technology that can automate mundane tasks the hope is that companies will be able to streamline media workflow and focus valuable resources on content creation and monetisation, rather than trawling through archives unnecessarily — both a frustrating and time-consuming task experienced by almost every journalist on a daily basis.

With LOYAL journalists have the advantage of:

Intelligent archive matching

As they are writing a piece, LOYAL matches relevant archived content to their article within their creative space so they don’t have to use search engines. This can provide context for new narratives and enrich articles.

Improved internal linking

The tool helps publishers easily target longer tail keywords and transfer link equity between pages as journalists find internal linking opportunities fast. They can quickly copy and paste hyperlinks into their article from the Chrome extension.

Quick view sentiment and entity analysis

LOYAL’s built-in sentiment analysis and suggested tags feature allows journalists to quickly scan content and gauge its approach to key topics at a glance.

Being able to view your entire archive in one web application

With access to a publication’s entire content library across brands, LOYAL makes it easy to access previously written content without spending time hopping between different CMSs.

Find out more about how you can unleash the potential of your publication’s archives with LOYAL’s journalism tool and start your free 14-day trial today.