A multilingual investigative CMS
A four-language newsroom covering immigrant communities. Editorial workflow, push notifications, donation integration, AI enrichment via direct Claude calls. Ongoing engagement.
4 languages·Investigative·WordPress
Services · No. 04 of 04
Four services for newsrooms that already exist.
We work with newsrooms, nonprofits, and editorial operations that are already up and running — and we make the parts underneath work better.
Service · No. 01
Newsroom modernization.
For newsrooms that exist but have outgrown the platform they started on. We extend, refactor, and customize — not replace from scratch.
Typical scope·6–12 weeks
Talk to us about your CMS →What we build into it
- → Editorial workflows
Multi-author (Co-Authors Plus), staged review (Edit Flow), scheduled publishing, drafts with version history. Editors get the tools they actually need.
- → Custom themes & plugins
WordPress themes that don't look like WordPress, custom plugins for donation displays, collapsible UI, dev-environment file proxying. The pieces nobody else has built yet.
- → Multilingual content
Up to 5 languages on a single publication — English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Haitian Creole, Chinese. Translation maps, drift detection, language-specific editorial teams.
- → Subscriber surface
Signup, archive, preferences. Newsletter (Mailchimp / Beehiiv / custom), web push (OneSignal), donation/fundraising integration (Givebutter + custom donation card plugins).
- → Syndication
RSS, Atom, Apple News integration. Whatever your audience subscribes to, your content shows up there.
- → SEO infrastructure
XML sitemaps, structured data, OG/Twitter cards, canonical handling, multilingual SEO. Yoast where it helps; custom where it doesn't.
Service · No. 02
Editorial pipelines.
Automation that runs your newsroom while editors sleep. Scrapers, AI enrichment, syndication, push, newsletter, analytics. The plumbing that turns a publication into an operation.
Typical scope·4–10 weeks per pipeline
Talk to us about a pipeline →What runs in the background
- → Multi-source content scrapers
Playwright-based ingestion from 3–10 sources, retry & alerting, scheduled daily. Our own runs at 99.4% uptime over two years. Same architecture available for yours.
- → AI content enrichment
Automated headlines, excerpts, SEO metadata, summaries, multilingual translations. Direct Claude / GPT calls where vendor tools (Nota, etc.) rate-limit you or fail on your non-English languages.
- → Syndication out
RSS, Atom, Apple News, email, web push (OneSignal), social. One content event fans out to every channel where your audience lives.
- → Analytics & impact dashboards
Parsely + GA4 wired up correctly. Plus custom dashboards for what those tools don't track — republication, citation counts, syndication reach, funder-grade impact reports.
- → Newsletter & push orchestration
Bring your provider (Mailchimp, Beehiiv, Substack-import). We wire publish events to send the right thing to the right list at the right time.
- → Donation & revenue integrations
Givebutter, Stripe, custom donation cards inline with content. The reader is one click from giving without leaving the article.
Service · No. 03
Investigative tools.
Custom dashboards for the work you can't do in a Google Sheet. Public-facing investigative tools, government data preservation, embeddable data visualizations.
Typical scope·6–14 weeks per tool
Talk to us about a tool →What we build
- → Public investigative dashboards
SvelteKit + Postgres or similar. Interactive maps, search by name/ZIP/category, filterable tables, CSV/JSON export, mobile-first. The kind of thing readers bookmark.
- → Government data preservation
Scrapers for federal/state/local datasets that get overwritten daily. Your archive becomes the historical record nobody else maintains. Compliance- and FOIA-friendly storage.
- → Embedded data viz
Datawrapper integration for the standard charts. Custom D3/Observable for the ones that need to be specific to your story.
- → Long-term archives
Versioned snapshots, point-in-time queries, retention policies. The data outlives the reporter who collected it.
- → Source-protection-aware design
Where readers can submit tips, files, or testimony, we design for source safety — no PII leaks in logs, no fingerprintable uploads, no analytics pixels in sensitive flows.
Service · No. 04
Migrations & newsroom IT.
Email, calendar, contacts, CMS, content archives. We migrate them safely — idempotent, dedup-by-design — and stick around to maintain the new setup. With editorial context most IT consultants don't have.
Migration·2–4 weeks
Ongoing IT retainer·Monthly
Talk to us about a migration →What we do
- → Email & Workspace migrations
Proton → Google Workspace, Outlook → Google, fragmented domains → consolidated. Mail, calendar with recurrence preservation, contacts. Idempotent re-runs — if something goes wrong, we re-import without duplicates.
- → CMS migrations
WordPress ↔ SvelteKit, Substack → custom, Webflow → real CMS. Content import, 301 redirects, SEO continuity, archive integrity. Zero-downtime cutover.
- → Editorial-context security consulting
Source protection. Journalist safety. Legal holds. Threat modeling for newsrooms specifically — the questions a generic IT consultant doesn't know to ask. P0/P1/P2 written action plans, not abstract recommendations.
- → White-glove migration support
Per-user check-ins. Slack FAQ. Platform-specific (Mac/Windows) staff guides with screenshots. Self-serve upload forms so staff never share credentials with us.
- → Ongoing IT retainer
User escalations, vendor research, security updates, helpdesk, proactive recommendations. Typically for newsroom teams of 10 to 30 people, with newsroom-specific judgment built in.
- → Fiscal-sponsor onboarding
If you're fiscally sponsored (Mission Edge, NEO, etc.), we know the IC agreement / ACH / background check rhythm. Plan an extra week into the timeline; we'll handle the paperwork.
How we work
Four phases. Ends on schedule.
Every project ships, and every project ends. Ongoing IT is the one exception.
- 01 Week 1 · Fixed fee
Discovery
A week of conversations — with editors, engineers, whoever's been doing the work-around. We come back with a written scope, a content model sketch, and a timeline. Fixed-fee, no commitment beyond it.
- 02 Weeks 2–3 · Weekly review
Foundation
Whatever the project needs to stand on: schema, auth, deploys, scrapers, base migration tooling. By week 3 there's a staging environment you can log into.
- 03 Weeks 4–N · Weekly review
Build
The features the project actually exists for. Weekly deploys to staging. You see every commit; you can pull the cord at any milestone.
- 04 Last week · Fixed fee
Handoff
Production cutover, documentation in your repo, a walkthrough call with your team, three months of email support included. Your codebase, your call from here. Optional IT retainer to follow.
The work
All case studies →Three shapes the work takes.
A public workplace-violations dashboard
Interactive map, business-name + ZIP search, CSV export, mobile-first. Plus a separate scraper preserving daily-overwritten federal data for investigative reporting.
SvelteKit·Mapping + CSV·Public
A newsroom email + Workspace migration
Proton Mail → Google Workspace for a 15-person community newsroom. Idempotent dedup design, RRULE-preserving calendar imports, platform-specific staff guides. Free security consultation included.
15 staff·3 weeks
Do you work with newsrooms outside the US?
Yes. We've worked with newsrooms in the US (NYC, Bay Area), Europe (Berlin, London-adjacent), and Latin America. We're set up for multilingual content across English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swedish, Haitian Creole, and Chinese.
Will you sign an NDA for a confidential investigation?
Yes. NDAs are standard. We've also designed source-protection-aware systems before — separate logs, no PII fingerprinting, no analytics in sensitive flows. Tell us the threat model up front and we'll design accordingly.
What stack do you use?
For new code: SvelteKit + Node + Postgres + Cloudflare, deployed on Cloud Run or your platform. For existing WordPress sites: custom themes, custom plugins, MySQL, DDEV local environments. For scrapers: Python + Playwright. For AI: direct Claude API. We'll work with whatever stack you already have.
When's the right time to bring you in?
Usually once you've been publishing for a year or two. An editorial system built before the editorial team exists tends to reflect assumptions about a workflow no one has tested yet — so we do our best work coming in once you know what you actually need day to day.
Start a conversation
A thirty-minute conversation.
No deck. No follow-up sequence. Just an honest conversation about what your newsroom needs, and a written proposal after.