The Turbo-Charged Turnaround of 20 Minuten – Switzerland's Most Read News Brand Gets a New CMS

This was the case with Swiss daily newspaper 20 Minuten, the most widely read news brand in Switzerland, and one of the several newspaper brands belonging to Swiss media company, the TX Group. The aim of replacing the previous content management system was to ensure that the digital channels, in particular, could be used as easily as possible. In order to continuously improve reader centricity, as well as the journalistic quality of the product, 20 Minuten needed a technology that could support this long-term plan.

20 Minuten is aimed at a broad readership and reaches over 2 million people. The amount of content and the range of topics covered and managed by the editorial team is correspondingly large. However, the in-house CMS was not tailored to the needs of “20 Minuten” in every respect. Therefore, they needed to implement a modern, versatile solution that would allow for the continual evolution of the product while reducing overall systems costs.

This is where Livingdocs came into play. The Livingdocs system is known for its flexibility and dynamism; every other month, new features are added — and outdated ones are removed — in order to keep the product lean and efficient. This ever-adapting quality – along with the highly intuitive UX and lean editor – positioned Livingdocs as the perfect solution to meet the requirements articulated by 20 Minuten. In addition, Livingdocs' approach to product development mirrors 20 Minuten's goals for the development of their web-first publication. 

The evaluation began in autumn of 2022, and once Livingdocs was chosen, this was followed by turbo-charged turnaround: development work began in March of 2023 and just under 10 months later, on January 9, 2024, 20 Minuten — along with its sister publications Le Matin, L’essentiel (DE/FR), and 20 minutes — all had gone live with Livingdocs.

Livingdocs delivered on the promise to rebuild the editorial systems of all five publications and meet all of the communicated requirements within a fair price.

What were these requirements that Livingdocs frictionlessly fulfilled? First and foremost, they needed to replace the internally built system with a new headless CMS smoothly and without creating any blocks for ongoing editorial workflows. Thanks to Livingdocs’s streamlined product structure, 20 Minuten and its related publications and their corresponding editorial teams were all able to set up Livingdocs successfully in a matter of a few months. The flexible, adaptable nature of Livingdocs also enabled the 20 Minuten team to include new features that enriched their content, and thereby made it more attractive to readers.

When it comes to specific features, 20 Minuten works heavily with live tickers for breaking news and standing topics. To ensure that the editorial team would be able to continue relying on this tried-and-tested narrative form, while better integrating it into the workflows, Livingdocs developed its own ticker tool, which has been used by all five digital brands since its launch.

Further, thanks to the WYSIWYG user interface of Livingdocs, 20 Minuten’s editors can create and manage their articles and pages efficiently while staying close to the end product.

20 Minuten

 Livingdocs in Action

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Tickers dashboard

A ticker in action

Seamless collaboration with co-workers when editing an article

Checking details in the images' metadata

Validating the quality of the image with Media Library Zoom.

Building a gallery

Since the go-live of Livingdocs, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The editorial team had shared that it is now fun to create content, emphasising the easy-to-use, intuitive interface and around-the-clock support from the Livingdocs team. The new system was immediately accepted by the team, and was running smoothly from the moment it was rolled out.

Moreover, as Livingdocs was implemented in a managed service model, 20 Minuten is able to enjoy the advantages of an Azure-hosted set up, including bimonthly upstream releases, faster configuration options, reduction of overall systems costs and around-the-clock maintenance by our DevOps team.

Livingdocs has proven that it can implement customer requests quickly. After the go-live, a short-term planning tool was developed that saves us a lot of time in organising articles and publishing them quickly. This helps the page maker to devote himself entirely to the news. Thank you for the great collaboration!

Daniel Waldmeier
Co-Editor-in-Chief, 20 Minuten

As in all Livingdocs projects, collaboration is key in order for the new system to perfectly complement the needs of the respective customer. In the case of 20 Minuten, the system and all elements were developed in close collaboration. In fact, the entire process before and after the go-live has been an exercise of intentional co-creation.

As a benefit of our MSP model, Livingdocs offers 20 Minuten 24/7 support from our team and points of contact who bring a perfect blend of technical and customer service skills to provide assistance whether when setting up new features or troubleshooting.

Manuel Sutter, Product Manager from 20 Minuten, noted that one of the best things about working with Livingdocs is our easy-going yet ever-professional attitude, as well as our straightforward communication and project management. He also remarked upon the value of our open-mindedness, which is crucial when developing new products alongside a client.

Looking ahead, Livingdocs will continue to support 20 Minuten in optimising newsroom workflows to facilitate their delivery of wide-ranging reader-centric content. To this end, we will develop new solutions and features to enable its publications to evolve both from a content and technological perspective.