Shepparton News publisher McPherson Media is building closer relationships with readers and advertisers following a project to consolidate and optimise its IT systems.

Based in country Victoria, Australia, the locally-owned company serves an audience of more than 2.5 million people there and in New South Wales. It distributes more than 505,000 publications a month, with digital products drawing more than 645,000 page views per month.

Brands include the daily Shepparton News, regional weeklies such as the Yarrawonga Chronicle and Southern Riverina News, and agricultural journals Country News and Dairy News Australia.

Among internal challenges were that newsagents owned the relationships with their customers, often selling fewer papers than they ordered, and that the tech stack had become too wide and fractured and split across too many vendors.

Now a suite of cloud-based Naviga solutions across circulation, advertising, content management, and web and print production streamlines both sales and editorial workflows, so that writers and ad reps can focus on their work and not the tools.

Chief technology officer Glenn James says that while many of McPherson’s print-only subscribers are still handled by newsagents, whenever one of them signs up for a digital product, they move into the integrated print and digital audience database. With these tools, they are gradually “pulling subscribers back into the fold” so they can learn about them and market to them on a one-to-one level.

An example is the ability to book to available ad inventory. “When we don’t have that half-page ad sold, we want to be able to put that out to the market and say, ‘Hey, we have a special price on this ad today.’ So it’s basically being able to book to our inventory, which is what we shall be able to do,” James says.

The fully integrated tech stack will mean they can go from campaign to proposal to billing [on the sales side] all in one step without any adjustment of systems.

James says McPherson has been able to unify its systems under one vendor, reduce IT costs by bundling tools and creating operational efficiencies, and improve continuity by simplifying its technology management needs.