Thirteen Years Behind the CMS of Local News

I ran the websites for Northeast Tennessee's newspapers from 2012 to 2025. Everyone writes about what happened to local news in the newsroom. This is what it looked like from the server side.

A phone call about 2015

Earlier this year, a man called the newsroom about a story from the summer of 2015. He wasn't calling to reminisce. When he searched his own name, Google showed that decade-old story with a fresh date, as if the paper had just published it that week. From where he sat, it looked like the paper had dredged up his past and run it again. He was upset, and honestly, I understood why.

Nobody at the paper had touched that story. What actually happened was quieter and stranger. The website had been migrated to a new platform, Google recrawled thousands of pages, and somewhere in the shuffle, the structured data that tells search engines when an article was originally published got scrambled. Google guessed. Google guessed wrong.

The fix took about twenty minutes once you knew where to look: correct the publish date in the page metadata, request a re-index in Search Console, wait. But it took an angry phone call for anyone to know the pipe had burst.

A message on Facebook

I didn't set out to work in news. Out of high school I went the hardware route, picked up an A+ certification and MCSE certifications many moons ago, and fixed machines for a living. Eventually I landed a work-from-home job doing tech support for Apple, which was a good gig. While I was doing that, I built a website for my cousin. I didn't fully know what I was doing. I built it anyway.

A couple of months later, a company called Geeks on Steroids, based in Colombia of all places, found my work and hired me to build websites. Not a website. Websites, plural, constantly, like a machine. That's where I learned SEO, mostly by producing enough volume that the patterns had nowhere to hide.

In 2012, a lady I went to high school with sent me a message on Facebook: would I be interested in talking about doing some website work for the newspaper? I met with the manager and started part-time, because I was still trying to do my own thing. I ended up staying thirteen years.

The company was Sandusky Newspapers, formally Sandusky Newspapers Inc., a family-owned group that at one point ran a dozen papers and forty-two websites across four states, from Ogden, Utah to right here at home. The local titles were the Johnson City Press, the Kingsport Times News, the Mountain City Tomahawk, the Erwin Record, and the Jonesborough Herald & Tribune. I was hired as a web designer for a division called The Net. The company also had a second digital division called the Times Digital Group. Two digital departments inside one newspaper company, which tells you something about the era: everyone knew digital mattered, and nobody had settled on what it was yet.

The Net and the Times Digital Group later merged into The Net 360, which became Six Rivers Digital, which eventually folded into the company itself. Four names for the same group of desks. Hold that thought, because the websites went through the same thing.

The newspaper was the region's web shop

Here's the part of the local news story nobody writes about, because you had to be inside the building to see it.

For years, the newspaper was not just the newspaper. It was one of the region’s better-positioned web shops, with a sales force, local relationships, production staff, and a reason to be in front of nearly every business, city, school, and civic group in the area. Through The Net, we built and maintained the City of Kingsport's websites. The Town of Jonesborough's. The Johnson County Chamber of Commerce. Carter County Parks and Recreation. Mountain Empire Community College. We provided support for BrightRidge, the local power provider, and built MyBrightRidge for their broadband service. We did Mountain Electric's site. At one point I even got to build the website for Dr. Enuf, the local soda, which remains one of my favorite lines on a resume that also includes municipal governments and a power utility.

At the peak, more than a hundred local websites ran through our shop.

Every essay about the decline of local news counts the same thing: reporters. Fewer reporters, fewer stories, less accountability. All of that is true and all of it matters. But when a regional newspaper company thins out, the community also loses things that never carried a byline. It loses the shop that built the town's website, the chamber's website, the college's website. That capacity drained away slowly. Managers left and clients followed them out the door. Hands changed and contracts lapsed. Nobody wrote an obituary for any of it, because nobody outside the building knew it existed.

I'm not arguing that a newspaper should be a web agency. I'm telling you it was one here, for a long time, and when people ask what a community actually loses when local news declines, the honest answer is bigger than the newsroom.

Four platforms in thirteen years

First, a quick translation, because I've used this term for so long I forget it isn't normal. A CMS is a content management system: the software a newsroom lives inside. Reporters type stories into it, editors shape them there, and it publishes everything you read on the site. If the website is the storefront, the CMS is the back room. When I arrived in 2012, ours was a custom CMS built in-house by one of the programmers at the Times News. I want to give that system, and the person who built it, their due. It was clean. It was fast. It performed well and the site looked good. It lacked some features the industry was starting to want, and in hindsight, "it works and we control it" was worth more than any feature we chased afterward.

What came next set the pattern for everything that followed.

In late 2013, the company publicly committed to a CMS called Libercus, built by a firm out of Tampa, and announced it would roll out across all print and digital channels. The press release called it a "leap forward in content management technology."

Inside the company, it went differently. Developers from all the properties were brought in to evaluate the platform. Nearly all of us came back with the same read: it was dated on arrival. The widgets looked old the day we got them. The strongest support came from Ogden, Utah. Leadership went that direction.

I've had more than a decade to think about why, and the most honest answer I have is structural, not personal. At a newspaper, a technical recommendation travels upward through so many layers that by the time it reaches the person who decides, the reasoning has been flattened out of it. The decision-maker hears two conclusions instead of two arguments, and picks the one attached to the most confident voice. Nobody wanted a bad outcome. The building was just wired so the "why" couldn't survive the trip. I watched that same wiring shape decisions for the rest of my time there.

Living with Libercus was as rough as we predicted. Reporters fought to get stories into it. Getting pages back out for print was its own battle. Our e-edition ran on Olive, and exporting from Olive into Libercus was a recurring nightmare. Years later I learned a detail that reframed the whole episode: Libercus eventually became a division of Block Communications, the conglomerate behind the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We had bolted a tool shaped by big-city print logic onto small East Tennessee papers, and then we were surprised when print workflows dominated everything.

Around 2018 we moved to TownNews, the biggest name in local news CMS. We built two generations of the sites with them, and that's when we launched our first apps. The apps were hybrid rather than native, which is a technical distinction with very untechnical consequences: they ran slow, hit walls, and frustrated the exact readers who most needed things to be simple. TownNews rebranded as BLOX Digital in 2023. It is majority-owned by Lee Enterprises, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country.

Notice the pattern, because it took me years to. Libercus ended up inside a newspaper conglomerate. TownNews belongs to a newspaper chain. For two decades, small local papers rented their digital infrastructure from other, bigger newspaper companies, using tools built around big print operations. People ask why newspaper websites all feel the same, and why print always seemed to win the internal arguments. Part of the answer is that print logic was baked into the software itself. We weren't just making print-first decisions. We were making them inside print-first tools.

In 2025 the company moved to mynews360, a platform from a company called Presteligence, chosen in large part because it integrates with the circulation systems. That isn't a hidden motive. The vendor markets that integration up front. It's also, across this whole industry, the tail wagging the dog: the subscription database ends up choosing the CMS. It was not the platform I would have picked. I got to design the new site, and I think the design had real promise. The implementation did not fully land the way I pictured it, which is often what happens when design, vendor constraints, and launch deadlines collide. The launch had its issues and hiccups, the way these launches do, and improved slowly from there.

Four platforms in thirteen years. Every migration cost months, burned staff goodwill, confused readers, and, as the man calling about his 2015 story discovered, quietly scrambled things nobody notices until they break.

The spiral

Now the traffic story, which is really a trust story wearing an analytics dashboard.

When I started in 2012, the internet was in what I'd call its clickbait age. Everybody chased the algorithm, and I'll be fair here: we did some of it too. It worked, in the way that borrowing works. Clickbait bought traffic and spent trust, and the whole industry ran up that tab together. When people say they stopped trusting the media, some of that distrust was manufactured for them. Some of it we earned.

Then trust in the press became a political battlefield. I'll keep my view of this simple, because it is simple. The press exists to keep power in check. When the press does its job, powerful people get upset. That's the arrangement working as designed. But when discrediting the press becomes the goal itself, everyone downstream pays, including a reporter in Kingsport just trying to get a Friday night football score in front of the people who care about it.

Put the self-inflicted damage and the deliberate damage together, and here's what it looked like in the data. Around 2016, Facebook referrals started dropping significantly. Site traffic followed. At the same time, the advertising economics underneath the free web caved in. Nationally, newspaper advertising revenue fell from roughly 49 billion dollars in 2006 to under 10 billion by the early 2020s, and in 2020, for the first time since at least 1956, the industry made more from circulation than from advertising. Think about that. The business model that funded American newspapers for a century and a half inverted while I was trying to keep the sites online.

Hardly anyone ever explained the original bargain to the public: targeted advertising is what paid for all that free content. Nobody sat readers down and said the deal was changing. They just hit a wall one day.

The wall was the paywall. We started soft, three free views a month. Later, the weeklies went hard, and the dailies moved to one free view per month. Traffic went straight down, and I don't think a single day passed without somebody complaining about it, in the comments, in the Facebook groups, at the gas station.

I get it. If it had been my call, we would have approached the paywall differently, and I'll get to that. But first I want to explain the part almost nobody outside this work understands, because it's the most important paragraph in this piece.

A paywall doesn't just block readers. It teaches the algorithms you don't matter. When fewer people read your stories, Facebook's systems register that your content isn't engaging, so they show it to fewer people. Google's systems register the falling engagement, so your rankings slip. Lower reach means lower traffic, which means worse signals, which means lower reach. Around and around. The paywall was meant to stop the bleeding from the ad collapse, and instead it opened a second wound: a self-reinforcing signals spiral that made the papers algorithmically invisible in their own towns.

You can see the end state of that spiral on any bad news day. Something happens locally, and watch who gets tagged in the Facebook comments. It's the TV stations. It's the local Facebook pages that, at least in their early days, had no standards at all and would post anything. That's how those pages got their rise. The newspaper holds itself to a higher standard, tries to be accurate, tries to verify before it publishes, and it pays for that standard in reach. The paper became the recap of a conversation the town had already finished somewhere else.

That's a positioning problem, and positioning problems are fatal in slow motion. If nobody knows you exist, there is no path to a subscriber.

The subscribers

Keep one thing in mind through all of this: most newspaper subscribers, at any paper, through this whole era, were older readers. Every platform change, every redesign, every new app was a small crisis for the exact people who had been loyal the longest.

Move a button, and the phones lit up. Launch an app, and someone who had read the paper for sixty years suddenly couldn't find the obituaries. Too often we shipped changes without a help section ready, and communicated the changes through channels our readers didn't use, if we communicated them at all. Then we'd find out how it landed by reading the angry Facebook posts.

I'm not laughing at those readers. The opposite. They were doing something increasingly rare: paying for local news. Every migration spent a little of their patience, and unlike traffic, patience doesn't come back when the metadata gets fixed.

What I would have done differently

Since I'm writing the maintenance log, I'll include the recommendations page.

I would have built the paywall around what's actually scarce. Lock the things nobody else has: the investigations, the columnists, the depth on local sports, and the community reporting that takes time to produce. Keep the commodity news open, the breaking news, the public safety stories, the things readers can get from three other sources anyway. Commodity news behind a paywall doesn't earn subscriptions. It just donates your traffic, and your algorithmic signals, to whoever publishes it free. Open commodity news keeps the signals alive and reminds the town you exist. That's the funnel. You can't sell subscriptions to people who never see you.

I would have gone all-in on the distribution tactics the platforms actually reward. Facebook has spent years trying to keep people on Facebook, and it quietly buries posts built around outbound links. So you post the photo, and you put the link in the first comment. Small thing. Measurably works. Same with vertical video: the algorithms have been pushing it hard for years, and it's the cheapest reach a local newsroom can buy.

I taught these things in trainings, to reporters and to sales staff, for years. A handful of reporters picked up the SEO practices and ran with them, and you could see it in their numbers. Vertical video was a harder sell.

And I'll close this section the only way that keeps it honest. Over the last couple of months, I've watched the reporters start posting vertical video, and it's pulling real numbers. The photo posts with the link in the first comment are showing up too. I suggested both years ago. I've decided to take it as a compliment with a very long delivery time.

The oldest town loses its paper

On August 13, 2025, the Jonesborough Herald & Tribune published its final stand-alone edition. It was 156 years old. Its first issues went to press in August of 1869, four years after the Civil War ended, in the oldest town in Tennessee. Not the oldest paper in the state, but old enough that closing it should stop you for a minute.

The four local papers had traveled together for a long time. The same regional group owned the Press, the Erwin Record, the Tomahawk, and the Herald & Tribune going back to 1981, decades before Sandusky, decades before Six Rivers. The weekend editions of the Times News had already been combined in 2023. The Herald & Tribune folding into the Johnson City Press was the first time a title in that family actually went away.

The company called it a difficult decision and cited declining advertising revenue and subscriber numbers, and I believe both halves of that sentence: that it was genuinely hard, and that the numbers left little room. I was there for it. Closing a newspaper is never an easy decision. Everything else in this piece, the platforms, the paywall, the spiral, the signals, is the long version of how a town founded in 1779 ended up without its own paper.

What survived

So after thirteen years, what survived?

Not the platforms. The custom CMS is gone. Libercus is gone. Both TownNews builds are gone. One day mynews360 will be somebody else's migration war story, and some future version of me will spend a week figuring out why Google thinks every article on the site was published last Tuesday.

You do not spend thirteen years keeping something running, through every migration and late-night break, without caring what becomes of it.

What survived is what got moved into people. I worked on projects a developer in a small market has no business getting near, alongside some genuinely great people. I was hired as a web designer, but the job became whatever the sites needed: PHP, CSS, JavaScript, React, Python, CMS troubleshooting, SEO, analytics, training, support, and the thousand small fixes that keep a digital operation from falling over. I taught CMS use, technical SEO, social media strategy, and short-form video tactics to reporters and newsroom staff. I taught digital marketing classes to sales reps. I taught a room full of professors at Mountain Empire Community College how to run their own sites. I helped develop web design curriculum for Northeast State by taking part in a DACUM process. Some of what I taught is showing up in the feeds right now, years later, working the way those tactics were always supposed to work. The platforms had a shelf life. The knowledge did not.

And the papers survived, which is not nothing. Diminished, consolidated, one title lighter, but still here, still sending somebody to the county commission meeting, still recording the small public facts of a place that no national outlet is coming to collect.

Local news still has a plumbing layer, and it still needs people who care about the pipes: the schema markup, the redirects, the URL structures, the quiet signals feeding the algorithms that now stand between a newsroom and its town. Most days, that work is invisible. Then a man calls about a story from 2015, and for twenty minutes, it's the whole company.

I still keep the sites running. Old habits.

Notes and sources

This is a memoir, so most of it is firsthand: I was in the building from 2012 to 2025, and I still do part-time support work for Six Rivers Media today. Every external claim above is anchored below. Where my memory supplied a year, I verified it against the record wherever a record exists.

• Sandusky Newspapers' public commitment to Libercus, the scale of the company at the time, and the "leap forward" language: company press release, December 2013, via Libercus, also carried by the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association.
• Libercus / E. Viddal & Associates as a division of Block Communications, builder of systems for the Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: company LinkedIn profile.
• TownNews rebrand to BLOX Digital, February 2023: Lee Enterprises press release. Lee Enterprises' 82.5% interest in the company: Lee Enterprises SEC filings, summarized at BLOX Digital.
• mynews360 as a Presteligence platform, with circulation-system and paywall integration marketed as core features: Presteligence myNews and Presteligence webCMS.
• Six Rivers Media formed at the start of 2020 when Sandusky Newspapers sold its properties outside Northeast Tennessee: Johnson City Press.
• Kingsport Times News moving from seven-day to six-day publication with combined weekend editions, April 2023: Kingsport Times-News.
• Jonesborough Herald & Tribune: founded August 1869, final stand-alone edition August 13, 2025, coverage folded into the Johnson City Press, and the company's stated reasons: Six Rivers Media announcement via the Kingsport Times News and WJHL coverage. The Carl A. Jones Newspaper Group's ownership of the four papers from 1981 is cited in the same WJHL coverage.
• National newspaper advertising revenue falling from roughly $49 billion in 2006 to $9.8 billion in 2022, and circulation revenue surpassing advertising revenue in 2020 for the first time since at least 1956: Pew Research Center Newspapers Fact Sheet and related State of the News Media analysis.