PA Media Group

Established as the Press Association in 1868, PA Media Group is the national news agency for the UK and Ireland, serving a broad range of customers including major media and digital brands around the world, businesses, and public sector organizations. Today, much of the content people read, see, or hear continues to originate from PA Media Group, whose products and services span pictures, video, data APIs, hosted live blogs, graphics, listings pages, social media curation, and page production.

As the UK’s leading provider of multimedia news content and services, it is imperative that the PA Media Group website is fast and easy to use, not only for the reporters and editorial team but for customers who are often racing to publish breaking news. With a website built on a proprietary content management system (CMS) that wasn’t keeping pace with modern and open-source alternatives, PA Media Group engaged 10up to transition the company to WordPress and transform the content entry process across the newsroom.

Informed by extensive work with digital publishers, 10up understands that speed is a critical part of a news organization’s success. With staff shift changes during story development, effortless collaboration among team members is crucial. This is especially important when you consider that PA Media Group is in the business of selling news worldwide.

A Custom Admin Experience

To enable reporters to quickly enter content, the editorial team to edit and manage stories and media, and the production team to publish and push final content to customers via a variety of APIs, 10up created a custom publishing workflow and experience inside of the WordPress admin, unique to the PA Media newsroom’s needs.

• WordPress editor customizations ensure that the content being input or edited matches the story output on the site, making it easy and fast for editors to find the exact content they need to edit.
• Custom page templates with pre-attached metadata reduce time and effort needed from reporters and prevent inconsistencies in human judgement and bias when classifying and tagging content.
• A custom admin screen that displays topical feeds of posts—similar to the TweetDeck software—helps staff quickly see where stories are in the publishing process and what has already been published.

In addition to simplifying and streamlining the editorial experience, 10up built supplemental tools that help reporters and editors get news stories to market as quickly as possible.

To enable editors to search, manipulate, and insert images hosted via PA Images, the national photography agency of Britain, 10up integrated the PA Images API within the media library. As part of the integration, the WordPress API was modified to produce additional image meta data and a CDN was integrated to output the images. Further customizations allow editors to select a point of interest for featured images and set the image aspect ratio/crop area (16:9, 4:3) per image.

Improved Search and Content Tagging

PA Media’s archives contain hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of news articles that the editorial team often needs to access and reference for developing stories. Leveraging its ElasticPress solution, powered by Elasticsearch, 10up improved the internal search experience with additional search filters, increased speed, and more relevant results.

10up also engineered a plugin leveraging the Amazon Comprehend API, a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. The WordPress plugin provides editors suggested content tags within the post edit screen, which improves efficiency and creates better content classification for future search needs.

10up Understands Digital Publishing

Just as PA Media enables national and regional newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, and public sector organizations to tell their own stories by providing fast, fair and accurate media services, 10up enables partners to achieve big ideas and goals through collaborative consulting, visual and user experience design, and back end, front end, and systems engineering.

Working with global brands and media leaders like PA Media Group, gives 10up unique insights into the challenges enterprises face when it comes to translating brands online and creating premium digital experiences. To discuss how 10up can help your organization, reach out today.