From Google Docs to One Screen: How a Finnish Newsroom Made Publishing Easier

Before Labrador, publishing meant moving words around. Freelancers sent in copy. Someone else would paste it to a Google Doc. Editors would change and eventually copy into WordPress. And the photos came from an entirely different system.

"It felt clumsy," says Tommy Pohjola, Editor in Chief of Kuntalehti and Kommuntorget.

Now he opens Labrador and stays there. Text, photos, and layout are all in the same view. Instead of Word or Google Docs, he’s just using the CMS. It saves time and can prevent mistakes when the copy lives in one home.

Two Sites. One Screen

Running two publications in two languages used to mean logging into two separate systems. Now both sites sit on the same screen. When Pohjola wants to share a story between Kuntalehti and Kommuntorget, including translating from Finnish to Swedish, or the reverse, the assets are already there.

Kuntalehti is one of the oldest magazines in Finland, founded in 1926. Elected officials rely on it and Kommuntorget to keep them informed about their communities. For publications with that kind of history and readership, a failed migration wasn’t an option.

CMS migrations can be notoriously hard. That wasn’t the case with Labrador. “Everybody was happy, the learning was easy,” Pohjola says. He even describes it as “fun.” When questions came up about how to do new things, there were only a few times when he couldn’t answer them. He says the Labrador onboarding team responded quickly.

The actual switchover was easy, too. One day, they were working on WordPress. The next day, they were publishing in Labrador CMS. Everything just worked.

"It's intuitive," he says. "I just go and push something and see what happens. And I really see what I get. Maybe for the first time ever."

Kommuntorget and Kuntalehti didn't make this move in isolation. They were part of a bigger modernization push, adding a new paywall, new digital asset management system, and new CMS, all in the same timeframe. For a small operation, it was a lot.

The Finnish Market

But Jyrki Rehumäki, a Finnish entrepreneur who represents Labrador in Finland from his new home in the United States, says the approach was exactly right. "They saw the chance to take CMS operations into their own hands and update their other systems at the same time."

That kind of organizational readiness is rarer than it should be, Rehumäki says. Finnish publishers tend to approach technology conservatively. Many have built their own CMS infrastructure in-house over decades and are reluctant to let it go.

"Finns are rightly proud of their engineering skills," he says. "The attitude is: I can build a better one myself."

That instinct made sense when the tools available weren't good enough. But the situation has changed, says Rehumäki, with the development of systems like Labrador that can handle what used to take a full internal team.

And it saves the publisher overhead resolving technical debt and maintaining software.

Advice for the Next Migration

Pohjola agrees. His advice to other publishers considering a migration is straightforward: find someone you can trust, and tell them what you need.

"Just be honest," he says. "Tell them: we don't have these skills. We really need someone to hold our hands and show us how to do things."

For Pohjola, the migration was never really about technology. It was about control — over the work, the platform, and the future of two publications that have been around for a century. Labrador gave them that. The rest, he says, was easier than anyone expected.

"We wanted to have our hands on the deck," he says. "Now we do."