Bridge Michigan

Bridge Michigan serves its readers with thoughtful, fact-based news and investigations as a non-partisan political reporter in Michigan. With an archive of more than 3,000 articles and numerous awards–including three consecutive wins for Michigan’s Newspaper of the Year, with the latest nomination in 2017–Bridge was ready to improve the way they present compelling journalism. More people consume news through the web than ever before, so we built a strong online platform to help this acclaimed magazine connect with their audience in a more engaging way.

1.5M

visitors per year

500+

articles published per year

50%

more traffic on mobile devices

Tagging Tools & Taxonomy

Within the CMS, editors can tag articles from a list of common categories or add specific keywords. These tools improve search results and connect related subjects, creating a dynamic taxonomy that displays relevant content for the reader.

Editors can also choose which news articles to feature on the homepage and other traffic-heavy landing pages.

Story Formats

Keeping web content updated and consistent with brand standards is a difficult task, but that responsibility becomes more complicated when it involves thousands of articles. Bridge’s new website uses the power of Drupal's Paragraphs module to allow content editors to create flexible formats for their stories. Captioned photo galleries, embedded video, sidebar profiles, interactive maps, and flexible formatting gives authors plenty of options for creating compelling content.

Archival System

It's important that readers can locate specific information or articles, regardless of the publish date. All content is valuable, so we built an archival system that makes it simple to dig up past stories. Readers can quickly search through more than 3,000 stories in the magazine's history.

Monitored Comments

Online news outlets are all about audience engagement. The back and forth dialogue that transpires in the comment section can add value to news articles. Our team created a platform that supports reader engagement, but allows editors to remain in control of the conversation. To protect the integrity of the Bridge Michigan brand, we set up automated tools to reject profanity and explicit links/images.

Everyone is pretty excited about what we’re seeing already! Pages per session keep going up! This is going to make a huge difference for Bridge readers ... We love working on the new Bridge site–thanks so much for all your team has done and continues to do to make Bridge’s web presence spectacular!

Bridge Michigan project team

Infinite Scroll

As readers approach the end of a news article, infinite scroll functionality will generate more content related to that subject. This custom-built feature encourages readers to spend more time on the site, reducing overall bounce rate and helping readers find more content that matches their interests.

Google News Integration

Online news outlets depend on increased visibility to bring more traffic to their site, and more impressions to their news articles. The new website is integrated with Google News, so every time an article is published, there's a higher chance it will be picked up in Google News feeds.

Results

Following launch, we tracked Google Analytics for notable changes in activity. We're proud to report these results:

122% increase in mobile usage
77% increase in average session duration
98% increase in average session duration for mobile
28% increase in organic search traffic

98%

increase in mobile session duration

Award-Winning Design

The “great content coupled with an attractive appearance” of the Bridge Michigan website earned it the honor of Best Website in the Michigan Press Association's 2018 Better Newspaper Contest.