Sometimes here at Alley and Lede we half wish that our servers would strain under pressure like they used to. As we’ve written previously, hardware performance improvement has outpaced the demands of even the largest news websites over the past decade. Add in software improvements, especially in databases, where columnar storage systems have supplanted a…

A growing imperative for media companies of all sizes is to directly manage first-party audience data so they can own the customer journey, so selecting the right providers for performance, value, and flexibility is top of mind.

Technical debt is one of the most apt metaphors in software development. It’s so apt, in fact, that it might deserve an accounting system of its own. The widespread use of AI coding tools has made technical debt cheaper than ever to accrue, but skills gaps and a lack of awareness could make it harder…

How people find information, including your site’s content, is changing—fast. AI search tools like Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity AI’s Deep Research, and Grok DeepSearch are redefining the way we search, summarize, and discover content. Being a “power searcher” used to mean knowing your Boolean operators. Now, it means knowing how to ask an AI to…

Does this sound familiar? You are in a deadline-focused organization and the work to maintain and improve your website is ruled by the tyranny of the urgent. You’re constantly in reactive mode, responding to bugs, maintenance issues, and urgent feature requests. As a result, seizing opportunities to build greater value into your website go unexplored…

Attempting to build and maintain your audience as a digital publisher is like trying to walk on unstable ground. You rely on social media and search to drive users to your website, but the status of these platforms is constantly evolving. From ownership changes to black-box algorithms and the changing tastes of users, every platform…

The challenges faced by news outlets and their teams are well documented: vanishing print subscriptions, limited ad revenue, the domineering whims of search and social media, and doing more reporting with fewer resources. Maybe these are all too real for you and your organization. But one topic rarely explored is the connection between these challenges…