Associated Press Case Study

The Challenge

The News Never Stops

Breaking news. It happens fast, and the world wants to know about it as soon as it happens. With 3.8 billion smartphones in pockets around the world, sharing information has never been easier and social media is inundated with first-hand video of news as it happens. These videos often lack context, are incomplete and biased, and by the very nature of viral videos can lead viewers to incorrect conclusions.

Since its founding in 1846, the Associated Press (AP) built its reputation for independent, unbiased reporting of world events by leveraging a global network of sources to collect the facts and accurately report the events that shape our world. Today, the AP keeps more than half of the world’s population informed with teams of journalists operating in 250 locations across nearly 100 countries and provides balanced, immersive, cross-platform content to more than 15,000 media outlets.

Expanded coverage requires a broader skillset

For its first hundred years, the AP delivered print stories via wire. Today, the AP delivers a comprehensive array of media products including video, audio, photography, data, print, and fully integrated multimedia immersive experiences, and the delivery of that content occurs over just as diverse a set of media.

From satellite uploads to cloud-based distribution, media outlets are demanding new ways to access AP stories, which put very real stresses on the Classic ASP platform. Migrating the legacy platform to something newer is never a simple “drag and drop”, particularly when multiple generations of developers made alterations without clear controls regarding architecture, coding standards, business rules, or clear documentation, all while continuing to produce current content, presented a drastic resource shortage.
The AP turned to the expertise of BairesDev for help.

The Solution

Building a Tech Dream Team

In the discovery phase, BairesDev and AP identified the formats and features that media outlets currently required, the current state of their Classic ASP platform, and blue sky solutions for the future. With every need identified, the team mapped out the technical solutions needed to give the AP, and its customers, a platform that was flexible and scalable.

With the use of AI-powered Team Recommendation Engine, BairesDev instantly identified and quickly assembled a team of the best engineers for the job. Experts in QA, C#, Microsoft .NET, Salesforce, and SQL Server, each BairesDev engineer is trained in design thinking which enables them to consider the context of their work and innovate better solutions.

The Outcome

Building a Framework for the Future

With the speed of today’s news cycle and the myriad of ways people access the news, the AP needed a framework that could move with the same kind of agility, and their existing web platform was slowing them down. The BairesDev team recommended migrating from Classic ASP to the Microsoft .NET framework for its advanced features and functionalities. The transition to .NET had three main drivers:

With its open-sourced framework, the increased agility to add functionality also put the AP on solid ground for future pivots and additions.

The news business is fast-moving, complex, and ever-changing. From our very first meeting with the team at BairesDev, we were confident that we’d selected the best partner. They didn’t just come in and start re-coding our platform. Like our journalists, they asked probing questions that enabled us to identify our base needs and they created scalable solutions that help us better deliver news to the world.

Sr. Director, Business Technology
AP

Providing the world critical, fact-checked news

Having maintained a successful and long-standing relationship for over 7 years, helped better understand the client-partner needs, in a way that BairesDev engineers efficiently migrated the content from nearly 20 sections, along with the historic databases that held past stories, being able to fact-check effectively and avoid misinformation in every content type to the new .NET framework. Leading to positive results that impacted the AP in ways they hadn’t anticipated.