Courier Newsroom Editorial Analytics Stack

The brief

Courier ran a network of eight owned media properties (Up North News, Keystone, Gander, Dogwood, Floricuas, Courier, Copper Courier, Cardinal & Pine, Americano). Every property had its own voice, content cadence, and audience strategy — but no unified view of engagement, growth, or pacing. And little budget for a commercial BI stack.

The approach

Designed, built, and flew the plane. Engineered an end-to-end newsroom analytics stack on Google Cloud Platform.

Key moves:

• GCP-native architecture — Looker (Data Studio) dashboards on top of BigQuery, with pipelines from WordPress, Sprout Social, Mailchimp, and voter file data.
• Multi-property design — all 8 publications in a single dashboard with filter-by-property and network-rollup views.
• Four-horizon pacing — weekly, monthly, quarterly, and YTD goal tracking with radial gauges and per-property bar breakdowns.
• Engagement + growth unified — social engagements, audience follower growth, video views, and email in one report.
• B2B storytelling — the dashboard was used directly in investor conversations and editorial strategy reviews. Built once, served two very different audiences.

The outcome

Drove audience acquisition and engagement above forecast, supporting private investment decisions. Tied content engagement directly to audience strategy — the editorial team could see what was working and adjust the next day, not the next quarter.