Introducing a new latimes.com powered by GrapheneCMS

As we celebrate the first anniversary of local ownership of the Los Angeles Times, we are pleased to announce the launch of our new digital platform and content management system, GrapheneCMS. This modernized, cloud-enabled content management system powers the updated design of latimes.com and our new mobile apps for iOS and Android.

We aim to provide you, our readers, with the best possible experience with our journalism, whether you prefer the classic design of a newspaper, a mobile-friendly presentation, or you enjoy streaming our video and audio programming. We’ve brought this all together in one digital system, accessible through our website and apps.

GrapheneCMS unifies our publishing systems into one content hub, built for today’s multimedia environment. Its innovative tools will save newsrooms time and money and will allow the industry to focus resources where they matter most, while putting the power of creativity, analysis and community engagement into the hands of the journalists.

GrapheneCMS is a search-based content management system that indexes our own content along with global news services, bringing together millions of stories and photos. This allows the Los Angeles Times to publish faster with greater access to information and enables us to bring you the news with context, perspective and insight.

Story planning and publishing are now facilitated with better communication tools, linking us with our community newsrooms and our sister newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune. GrapheneCMS also provides better integration with our print production system to enable greater and more efficient coordination across platforms.

Our site has been completely redesigned to be more informative and enjoyable.

• Cleaner, friendlier design across the whole site.
• More stories to choose from on the home page and section pages.
• Pages, including stories and galleries, load dramatically faster.
• The site is optimized for mobile users and meets the latest accessibility standards.
• More sophisticated story presentations highlight photos and videos, and make reading easier.
• Live blogs keep you up to date when news breaks.

The system makes it easier to find the coverage you care about, whether it’s politics, food or sports.

• Navigation has been streamlined to get you where you want to go, faster.
• Pages have been built from the ground up so that you can find stories more easily through search engines like Google.
• We have improved search on the site so you can find specific stories more easily — from any story or section page.

Additional improvements will unfold over time. As our newsroom and others around the country adopt and develop this technology, its most important contribution will be the power to unlock the potential of digital newsrooms

GrapheneCMS also powers our new mobile apps for iOS and Android, featuring:

• A news feed curated by our editors.
• Access to the eNewspaper with easy navigation across sections, searchable archives and offline reading.
• One place to explore our video content, and soon a place for podcasts.
• A library where you can save your favorite stories.

We value the time you spend with us. We’ve reduced the number of ads on our site to provide a better reading experience and cleaner display of advertising, especially on story pages. Our hope is that you’ll value your time with us enough to subscribe. In the coming months, we plan to offer our subscribers a premium reading experience with fewer ads.

We have implemented a new commenting system to serve our community better. This will help you provide valuable feedback to our journalists and promote conversations about the issues we cover.

Our commenting system will be restricted to registered users to encourage respectful, constructive commentary. The platform is designed to bring readers and journalists together to share tips and compare notes, and the best comments will be highlighted for better visibility. Readers will be able to “respect” comments instead of “liking” them, as part of an overall push to elevate the conversation. In the coming months, we’ll offer a more robust reader interaction experience, highlighting the best community voices across the site.

The power of GrapheneCMS will enable search in many ways. Our story and multimedia archives will now largely be housed in a single digital management system, enabling us to be both faster and more sophisticated in our response to news. This move will provide readers with greater access to our past coverage of important news events.

GrapheneCMS was developed by NantMedia’s California Times and NantWorks with the Brightspot platform from our strategic partner, Perfect Sense. Our vision is to build something more than a website and publishing tool. Our goal is to offer a platform for community, discovery, inquiry and debate. Today’s improvements are an important step in that journey. Indeed, we will seek to provide this next-generation content management system to other journalism organizations that aim to provide their readers with a better news experience.