Content Is Infrastructure
Publishers that want to deliver content flexibly, quickly, and across every channel must think about their publishing infrastructure at the same time: a technologically future-proof foundation that delivers content with high performance, low latency, and strong security while scaling as demands grow.
Josef illustrated this approach using the example of CH Media, where a change of ownership required the existing technology platform to be replaced under significant time pressure. He explained that the situation had been used as an opportunity to establish IT as a driver of innovation. What began as a technical necessity became the starting point for an entirely new architecture.
Success Factor 1: Decouple Creation from Delivery — Completely
The core architectural decision was to strictly separate content creation from content delivery and connect the two through an event-driven Content Delivery Hub. On one side are editorial teams publishing through a headless CMS supported by planning tools and AI-powered auto-tagging. On the other side are millions of readers accessing content via the web, native apps, and e-paper.
Josef explained that the rationale behind this separation comes down to a striking imbalance: content changes only a handful of times a day, while the system handles hundreds of read requests every second — a ratio of roughly 1,000 to 1. A central hub that decouples the two sides and serves them independently reduces the load on the infrastructure while lowering operating costs.
Success Factor 2: Manage and Orchestrate AI Centrally
Josef’s second point focused on the role of AI. Rather than implementing AI services as scattered, standalone solutions across the system, he argued for managing them centrally within the Content Delivery Hub. He emphasized that publishers need to learn to manage these services in a unified way.
He illustrated what this could look like in practice using a prototype currently under development at Forward Publishing. Applications such as text-to-speech, automatically generated topic pages, and Chattable News — a conversational interface built on a publisher’s own content rather than a general-purpose language model — can run on a shared, stable infrastructure that is both scalable and cost-efficient. Forward Publishing and CH Media will soon launch a joint proof of concept to explore this approach further. By contrast, distributed, siloed solutions are difficult to govern and offer little cost transparency.
Success Factor 3: Benefits for Readers and Publishers
Josef concluded by highlighting the impact of this approach on both readers and publishers. For readers, the benefits include faster load times, personalized delivery of hyperlocal content down to the municipal level, and an e-paper that is fully integrated into both the website and the news app.
For publishers, the greatest advantage is flexibility. New portals and digital offerings can be launched on the existing platform in a fraction of the time, without rebuilding the infrastructure each time. Josef concluded that this is where the true business value of a modular content architecture lies.
