Landing pages, newsletters and revenue features at a daily newspaper

Context

sltrib.com runs on Arc XP Fusion — the publishing platform the Washington Post built and now licenses to other newsrooms. Work happens in React components that slot into editor-configurable page layouts, backed by Node services and Lambda functions. I’ve contributed around 850 commits to it since 2021.

The Tribune converted to nonprofit status, which shapes the engineering priorities: the features that keep the lights on are newsletters, subscriptions and donations, and they get the same care as the editorial tools.

Landing pages

A steady part of the job is landing pages — standalone pages built for a specific campaign, offer or project, outside the article templates the newsroom publishes into every day. They arrive with a real date attached and people waiting on them, so they are good practice at building something complete and correct quickly, rather than iterating on it for a quarter.

Migrating the newsletter platform

One of the largest pieces of work was moving the Tribune’s newsletter system from Mailchimp to Iterable. That is less a swap than a rebuild:

• New signup components across the site, including the inline units that appear inside articles
• A reader-facing preferences page where subscribers choose which newsletters they get
• The Lambda functions behind it — subscribe, unsubscribe, and update preferences — talking to Iterable’s API
• Retiring every Mailchimp-connected component once traffic had moved over

Newsletter signup is a conversion surface, so the work had to be correct on the first try in production: a broken unsubscribe link is both a bad reader experience and a compliance problem.

Revenue features

A nonprofit newsroom asks readers for money constantly, and how you ask matters. I built and maintain:

• Banner offers targeted to article pages
• The donation ask, including copy and layout changes the audience team could run
• Gift subscriptions, surfaced in the footer and the subscribe flow
• Article sponsorship components, including sponsored coverage of the Utah Jazz

The bill tracker

Utah’s legislative session is a major story every year. I worked on the bill tracker that lets readers follow legislation — a sortable table fed by a bills API, including the null-safety work that keeps a table rendering when upstream data is incomplete, which with government APIs is often.

Platform work

Alongside features: upgrading the application to React 18, an Airtable migration, environment and secret configuration across sandbox and production, and caching work. The unglamorous half of a long-lived codebase, and the half that decides whether the next three years of feature work is pleasant.

What it teaches

Shipping continuously to an audience that notices immediately when something breaks. It’s also where I learned to work inside someone else’s platform — you don’t get to rewrite Arc XP, so you learn its grain and build with it. That habit carries straight into client work, where the constraint is usually a budget or a non-technical owner rather than a CMS.