Case study · Publishing

LA Progressive

A growing political-news site that runs hottest exactly when the stakes are highest. For more than a decade we’ve kept it fast, online, and publishing — through every election night.

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Publishing · Los Angelesprogressive news, politics, and community voices
Care + development · 10+ yearsWordPress, subscriptions, voter guides

The setup

LA Progressive is an independent news and politics publication with a growing national readership — and a publishing schedule that never stops. Sharon Kyle and Dick Price built it into one of Los Angeles’ essential progressive voices.

Political publishing has a rhythm all its own: readership builds all year, then election season hits and everything spikes at once — traffic, contributors, deadlines, and attacks. The platform has to hold precisely when failure would be most visible.

We’ve been their team for more than a decade — the developers, the fixers, and the people who answer the phone at the worst possible moment.

The challenge

Keep a high-volume news site fast, secure, and publishing — through election-season surges that punish weak platforms.

  • Always publishing. A daily, multi-author newsroom can’t stop for maintenance windows or mystery errors.
  • Election-season surges. Traffic that multiplies overnight when a story or a ballot lands.
  • Reader revenue. A subscription model that had to be built without paywalling the mission away.
  • A target on its back. Political sites attract more than readers — security has to be boring and constant.

The solution

Long-haul care: platform work, feature builds, and a human who picks up.

  • Managed care + performance. Updates, monitoring, and tuning that keep a heavy, decade-deep content archive fast.
  • Voter guides, every cycle. Purpose-built guides that turn election-season traffic into the most useful pages on the site.
  • Subscriptions + memberships. Reader-revenue infrastructure built into the platform, not bolted on.
  • There when it counts. Election nights, breaking stories, the occasional 2am emergency — handled.
The results

A decade of showing up.

10+ yrs

as LA Progressive’s platform team — and counting.

Every cycle

voter guides planned, built, and shipped for each election season.

Surge-proof

election-night traffic spikes handled without the site blinking.

Subscriptions

a reader-revenue model built out on the platform they already had.

The newsroom never waits

Editors publish on their schedule, not ours. The care work happens invisibly — updates, security, performance — so the only thing readers ever notice is the journalism.

More than a vendor

Over ten years you stop being a contractor and start being part of the operation. We’ve planned features around election calendars, talked through revenue models, and picked up the phone when it mattered most. That’s the actual product.

“LA Progressive is my baby — and no one takes care of my baby like DigiSavvy.”
SK
Sharon KyleEditor-in-Chief, LA Progressive
Your turn

Need a partner for the long haul?

The best platform stories are the boring ones that last a decade. If your site needs a team that sticks around, let’s talk.

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