Hearst Corporation

Hearst Corporation is one of the nation’s largest and most diversified media companies, with major interests spanning magazines, newspapers, business publishing, cable networks, television and radio broadcasting, digital media, and real estate.

Relying on a first-generation content management system, Hearst faced challenges with system support and scalability. To maintain smooth operations during a major transition, the company needed expert technical assistance to manage and optimize performance while training staff and uploading new content.

Genacom’s nTier Managed Services team provided the specialized support required to keep Hearst’s operations running seamlessly. This included data management, staff training on the new CMS, and custom configurations tailored to Hearst’s publishing workflows—ensuring a smooth transition and improved long-term efficiency.

The situation

Hearst publishes some of the best-known magazines, newspapers and broadcast properties in the United States. The business unit Genacom worked with was moving off a first-generation content management system that had become hard to support and impossible to scale. The migration itself was underway, but the day-to-day operation could not stop: editors still had to publish, campaigns still had to launch, and the new platform's rough edges had to be smoothed without pulling the internal team away from the transition.

What Genacom did

Genacom's nTier Managed Services team took over the operational load. That covered data management during the migration, so content moved cleanly and nothing was lost between systems; hands-on training for editorial and marketing staff on the new CMS, delivered around their publishing schedule; and custom configuration of the platform to match Hearst's real workflows rather than the vendor's defaults. As the new system settled, the engagement widened into search optimization and digital marketing support for a travel and lifestyle property.

The results

The outcomes Hearst reported are the ones listed on this page: web traffic rose by 35 percent, the property earned a page-one Google ranking for the highly competitive query "best places to visit in California", and social media marketing came to account for 23 percent of total sales for the campaign involved. Behind those numbers was unglamorous work: clean structured content, fast pages, correct metadata, a publishing team that could use its tools confidently, and a site that stayed up during the transition.

What it shows

Large publishers have in-house technology teams; what they often lack is capacity for the operational middle layer during a change of platform. Genacom's model is built for exactly that gap: an outside team that integrates into the client's systems and processes, trains the people who will own the platform, and hands it back stronger. The same model serves medium-sized businesses that have no web department at all.

Services involved

Website management, CMS migration support, data management, staff training, custom configuration, SEO audits and optimization, and digital marketing. Read about content updates and maintenance and digital marketing on a managed website, or request a quote.

How the migration support was organized

A publishing operation cannot pause for a platform change, so Genacom's engagement was built around Hearst's editorial calendar. Content migration ran in batches scheduled between publishing peaks, with every batch verified for completeness, links, images and metadata before the next began. Training was delivered in short, role-specific sessions: editors learned the publishing workflow, marketing learned campaign pages and tracking, and administrators learned user and permission management, each with written guides they could keep. Custom configuration of the CMS followed the same principle: instead of asking staff to adapt to a generic system, Genacom configured templates, workflows and approval steps to match how Hearst already worked. Search optimization and digital marketing began once the platform was stable, so that improvements in traffic and rankings were measured against a clean baseline rather than a moving target.

Why publishers and content-heavy sites choose managed services

Organizations that publish constantly feel every weakness in their web operation immediately: a slow page loses readers, a broken template stalls a story, a security gap puts subscriber data at risk. Genacom's website management model gives them continuous operational cover without adding permanent headcount. Updates are tested on staging before release, performance is measured monthly, security is patched within days of a disclosure, and content changes go to a team that already knows the platform. For Hearst that support carried a business unit through a platform change; for a smaller publisher, a university or a marketing department that ships weekly, it is the difference between a site that keeps up and one that quietly falls behind.

What a media company taught Genacom about change

The Hearst engagement set a rule Genacom still applies to every migration and redesign: the site cannot stop working while it is being improved. Every change is planned around the client's own calendar, tested on a staging copy that mirrors production, released in a window the client approves and verified afterwards against a checklist of the pages and features that matter most. Editors, marketers and executives are trained before the switch, not after it, and the documentation they receive is written for their roles rather than for engineers. For a publisher that meant hundreds of stories a week kept flowing through the transition. For a smaller business it means a redesign, a platform move or a security upgrade that customers never notice, which is exactly the point.