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To break down the barriers between content and data and deliver a more meaningful content experience Racing Post, a leading authority in sports journalism, sought to retire their bespoke, ageing internal content management systems, selecting Glide Publishing Platform for its CMS functionality, partnership, and publishing expertise.
Filling a unique position serving as both a content publisher and data services provider Racing Post serves a diverse range of audiences, from racing industry professionals to recreational enthusiasts. Through its highly complex daily print publication, website, and apps, Racing Post delivers public and subscription-based products to three core audiences:
While the data that each audience is served is broadly the same, meeting the very different article and content demands is a real challenge, with large variations in depth, seriousness, and coverage.
These varying audience needs, plus the complexity of the data services business, led Racing Post to develop two content management systems both fully managed and maintained in-house. As time went on, and the complexity of what Racing Post was delivering grew, maintaining the two CMSs while also delivering enhancements became unsustainable.
To maximise their ongoing growth and reimagine what they could deliver for their audiences, Racing Post sought to migrate from their internal, bespoke CMSs to a single modern, fully hosted and managed CMS.
With the objective of consolidating and modernising their technology, while improving their sites and apps to put users at the centre of their products with better content and accessibility, Racing Post set out with a very clear directive — to find both a platform and a business partner they could collaborate with and rely on in the long term.
Emphasising their unique requirements, particularly their relationship with data and the extent to which data was integrated into their in-house solution, Racing Post found themselves attracted to Glide Publishing Platform’s understanding of journalism, having lived it, and the team’s immediate understanding of the unique facets of what Racing Post does as a business and the potential of it.
“Glide was unlike anyone else we spoke to in that they got what we were trying to do, instantly understanding the content and data workflow challenges we were trying to tackle,” said Tom Kerr, Editor of Racing Post and Group Content Director for Spotlight Sports Group.
“Something I was keen to do was break down the barriers between the content and data elements of our offering, integrating the two together more effectively, bringing together content, data and race results together in a contextually relevant manner. In our search, we didn’t really see a lot of examples of platforms effectively enabling this. In Glide we found a partner who understood that desire and had a collaborative mindset that saw the opportunity to not only meet our needs but to enhance the Glide CMS offering.”
The migration to Glide kicked off in 2020 following a three month forced shutdown due to Covid-19 that brought the equestrian events at the centre of Racing Post’s offerings to a grinding halt.
Providing information architecture consultancy, Glide executed a move and performance improvement of more than 130,000 articles, going back three previous CMS projects, from Racing Post’s internal CMSs to the Glide CMS.
A key outcome of the migration was the centralisation and revitalisation of the migrated content, cleaning up historical issues remaining from previous migrations, much of which had been left fragmented or made impossible to use due to bad metadata and malformation.
To support clean, digital first workflows, Glide integrated Racing Post’s print CMS into the Glide CMS. Now, editors can send content not only based on workflow status with the click of a button but also at their discretion, enabling them to send both live content as well as those articles still in development, including updated versions of an article as content and stories may change throughout the day.
Breaking down data barriers
Central to delivering the seamless content and data experience Racing Post sought was in the ability to integrate external systems into the Glide CMS.
Chief among these was integrating Racing Post’s proprietary database, an extensive data service containing billions of data points, with the Glide CMS. To meet this need, Glide saw an opportunity to create a new External Data custom field type that allowed for the integration of external data sources. With the flexibility of the Glide platform, developing the new field type and connecting Racing Post’s database took just a handful of hours.
Now, when Racing Post’s Editorial team creates content, say a race report for example, they simply embed the External Data widget in Glide’s Composer interface and select the races they want to display. The race card results are then automatically populated on the front-end, delivering hugely important information for Racing Post’s readers, both recreational and professional, alongside the written content of the race report.
Another key aspect to breaking down barriers for their audiences was to implement on-page betting. Again using a custom widget, betting functionality was seamlessly integrated into the Glide CMS, enabling the editorial team to simply embed the bet button widget while crafting their content in Composer.
“Betting and horse racing are synonymous. If our customers have to leave our products to go place a bet it's not a seamless journey for them,” said Kerr. “We have betting integrated in our products and now we have it integrated through Glide in our content so if you’re reading a race preview or advice from one of our experts, with one click you can place a bet directly from that content without having to leave the page.”
Racingpost.com Full Race Results Card
By migrating from their internally managed CMSs and consolidating to Glide, Racing Post stripped vast inefficiencies out of its workflows and fortified its content infrastructure while de-risking their technology and freeing up budget.
For Racing Post’s editorial team, Glide brought control of each of their content channels into one system, under one roof, providing a major leap forward in their ability to fine-tune content for different channels and readers.
Prior to the pandemic and migration to Glide, Racing Post operations were still heavily influenced by print. Today, the majority of Racing Post’s business is geared around its digital platforms, with digital accounting for more than half of their revenue, and climbing, and visitors to their sites and apps topping 1.5 million on the days of large equestrian events, up from around 300,000 on an average day pre-pandemic.
“Looking back, you think the pandemic was a traumatic period and it definitely left a few scars,” Kerr said to Press Gazette. “But it also allowed us to make a lot of progress, to bring a lot of new customers to our digital products and to our subscriber product. We made a lot of progress in a short period of time.
“In Glide we found an exceptional piece of software that has more than lived up to our expectations, solving the various and complex problems that we brought to the table,” said Kerr. “Even more pleasing has been the collaborative, hyper-responsive, and solution-focused approach from the team at Glide, who from day one has been genuinely invested and engaged in working with us to achieve our goals.”
Today, Racing Post continues to enhance how their content and data are presented while focusing on delivering that content in the most accessible and engaging way possible, leveraging Glide’s technology and expertise to help them do so.
Most recently, this took form in implementing Glide’s natively built Live Reporting toolset on racingpost.com. The primary motivation for enacting live reporting wasn’t simply for audience engagement — although Kerr noted that this is a very important aspect of sports coverage and was a missing piece of their content mix — but to improve Racing Post’s search traffic during live events.
In coordination with Glide Principal Consultant, John Salmon, who provided guidance in live blog reporting best practices, Racing Post first used the Live Reporting toolset during their coverage of the 2024 Royal Ascot with great success — including reaching the Google search top result for the search term ‘Royal Ascot’ during the event week with its live blog coverage.
Pleased with the Live Reporting functionality and the impact it made on its search traffic and engagement, Racing Post has since expanded usage of the toolset within the Racing Post app.
To learn more about Glide CMS and to see what Glide can do for you, connect with a Glide product specialist.
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No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
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