The STP Awards are given out at Schibsted Tech Polska´s annual Winter Event
The content management system is at the heart of any professional and modern newsroom. It defines the workflow, how journalists cooperate with each other, how easy it is to combine text, images and video into attractive articles and whether the newsroom is able to work as efficiently as possible.
Therefore changing a content management system in a media house is almost always a huge project. It requires a new way of working for the journalists, while the software engineers have to figure out how to migrate all the content from one system to the other without losing any data.
Project of the Year
This year´s Project of the Year award in Schibsted Tech Polska was given to the Schibsted Media Platform Onboarding project. The award is given at the annual Winter Event. This year the prize was a dream day with a Tesla car, including fun activities and good food.
10 software engineers in Krakow were involved in the year-long project, cooperating closely with as many colleagues in Norway.
Watch the project presentation
All nominees for the Schibsted Tech Polska Awards present their projects during the Winter Event. Here is the 5-minute long presentation of the Schibsted Media Platform Onboarding project, given by engineering manager Michał Jaeschke:
13 newsrooms migrated
Schibsted Media Group owns a number of leading media houses in Norway and Sweden. Previously the media houses ran different content management systems. But over the last couple of years, Schibsted has developed its own Schibsted Media Platform, reinventing the tools for modern journalism. Almost all media houses have now been migrated to the new platform.
The Project of the Year winners migrated 13 different newsrooms to the new platform over the last year. These include leading regional subscription newspapers like Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad and Fædrelandsvennen, as well as a series of small local newspapers.
Part of the team receives the Project of the Year Award at the Schibsted Tech Polska Winter Even in Warsaw. From the left: Michał Jaeschke, Marek Smęt, Przemysław Godyń, Bartosz Chucherko and Tomasz Zakrzewski.
2,5 million articles
No less than 2,5 million articles were moved from the old systems to the new Schibsted Media Platform during the project. The articles went more than 15 years back in time.
Two different migration teams in Schibsted Tech Polska have worked on the project.
“But all in all I guess around 50 people – in Poland, Norway and Sweden – have been involved in the different migrations, ” says engineering manager Michał Jaeschke.
He explains that the migration teams in Krakow have to coordinate closely with two different groups: The staff in the newsrooms that will change their daily tool and the software engineering teams that are developing the new publishing platform.
The Schibsted Tech Polska Awards ceremony is the highlight of the annual Winter Event.
Biggest challenge
According to Michał Jaeschke the biggest technical challenge has been to ensure 100 % uptime for the news publishing platform.
“Newsrooms work around the clock – and it is immediately a big crisis if they cannot use their content management system to produce articles,” he points out.
But the teams achieved very good results in this area.
In the project, all systems were also moved in a cloud-based solution based on Amazon Web Services.
- Blog article from the migration team: Serverless architecture – AWS Lambda
The winning team
Here are the members of the winning Project of the Year teams:
Tomasz Zakrzewski, Bartosz Chucherko, Przemysław Godyń, Dorota Krzos, Przemysław Kuliga, Michał Jaeschke, Radosław Lisowski, Marek Smęt and Paweł Słowik.
Congratulations!