Retiring a proprietary content management system and consolidating nearly 150 local television stations onto a single WordPress platform, with more than a thousand journalists trained to publish on it.

Challenge

Nexstar Media Group operates local television stations in markets across the United States, and those station websites are how its newsrooms reach their audiences between broadcasts. In early 2019 more than 70 of those sites ran on Lakana, a proprietary content management system built and maintained by the company’s own subsidiary, Nexstar Digital.

Nexstar Digital had a mandate to end that dependency: eliminate its reliance on Lakana, sunset the platform for the external customers still running on it, and consolidate every station on a new system by the end of the second quarter of 2019. The scope then grew mid-project. In the third quarter of 2019 Nexstar acquired Tribune Media, which added dozens of stations to the platform, most of them in markets larger than those already migrated.

One WordPress platform for nearly 150 newsrooms

Every station moved to a shared WordPress instance running on WordPress VIP, where one codebase serves the entire network. Almost 150 television stations were migrated in total, including the Tribune properties acquired partway through the work, and more than a thousand journalists were trained on the new publishing tools.

Consolidating on WordPress did more than replace a CMS. Retiring Lakana removed the cost of building, staffing and hosting a proprietary platform for a shrinking set of customers, and saved more than five million dollars a year in staff and server costs. It also allowed Nexstar to simplify its technology division and merge it back into the primary business rather than continue operating it as a separate software concern.

Key Stats