A toolkit for newsrooms whose homepage stopped being the front door

Context

Homepage traffic has been falling across local news for years. Readers arrive from search, social and aggregators, landing directly on a story — which means the article page, not the homepage, is where most people form their impression of a publication and decide whether to come back.

The article page was never designed for that. It was designed to display one story to someone who had already chosen the publication. Everything the homepage used to provide — orientation, what else is happening, a reason to subscribe — simply isn’t there.

I was an institutional fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute for the 2024–2025 class, working on this at The Salt Lake Tribune. I’d been there two and a half years and wanted to redesign the article page and test different widgets against real traffic rather than argue about it in the abstract.

What the toolkit covers

The output is the Article-as-Homepage toolkit — a resource for independent local publishers rather than an internal document. It works through:

• Presenting reporting in richer multimedia formats than a single column of text
• Giving readers the utility the homepage used to hold, on the page they actually landed on
• Collecting first-party data, and building pathways toward subscriptions, donations and other deeper forms of support
• The wireframe and design thinking behind the Tribune’s own article redesign
• Advertising placement — supporting the journalism without wrecking the reading experience
• Newsletters as a conversion surface: subscribe asks, personalisation, testing
• A survey of CMS options, for newsrooms deciding what to build on

Building it as a published site

The toolkit is a GitBook on its own domain rather than a PDF or a slide deck, which was the right call for something meant to be used rather than filed. It can be linked to section by section, searched, and updated after publication — and a newsroom can land on the one chapter relevant to the decision in front of them without reading the rest.

Writing for other newsrooms is a different job from writing for your own. The Tribune’s specifics — our CMS, our ad stack, our audience — are the evidence, not the instructions, so each section had to separate the reasoning from the implementation enough that a publisher on entirely different infrastructure could still act on it.

What it teaches

This is the closest thing I’ve done to the handover problem at a professional scale. A toolkit nobody can apply is the same failure as a website its owner can’t update: the work is only finished when someone else can use it without you in the room.

It also sharpened how I talk about trade-offs. Ads versus reading experience, data collection versus friction, richness versus page weight — none of those have a clean answer, and writing for an audience of strangers meant presenting the tension honestly instead of pretending a single right choice existed.