MNA Digital is the Digital agency of the Midland News Association. While we benefit from the rich history of a company founded in 1889, we also share benefits with companies founded in 2016. (See 'Modern benefits' below)

MNA Digital

Based within the offices of the Express & Star headquarters on Queen Street in Wolverhampton, MNA Digital operates as a digital agency for local businesses and also as the digital arm of the MNA, providing news to the West Midlands through expressandstar.com and shropshirestar.com.

Our regional news products connect us with local users and provide us with a unique platform to connect local businesses to a relevant, engaged audience. Alongside our news assets our digital agency also makes use of standard industry marketing tools such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads and powerful SEO drivers.

While many of these tools can be bought individually, our strongest and best value products are subscriptions which package many or all of the above into cost effective marketing solutions for local businesses.

What We Do

The development team within MNA Digital has two key areas of focus based on our activities above;

1. We invest in our news platforms to improve the user experience and monetise our content.
2. We build web based software solutions such as 'Insight', to support the agency side of MNA Digital.
3. We experiment with new approaches to news, business and advertising to further grow MNA Digital's contribution to the MNA.

News platforms

The MNA owns and operates two newspapers, Express & Star and Shropshire Star, both among the most successful regional newspapers in the country. Their online counterparts, expressandstar.com and shropshirestar.com, are also amongst the highest ranked of regional news sites with 14-20 million pageviews every month and tens of millions of unique devices.

MNA Digital developers work with the MNA's journalists to optimise the news platforms for this considerable audience.

shropshirestar.com became one of the first responsive news sites in the UK when it launched in the current design in August 2012. Both MNA sites are overdue for a redesign to bring them back to the top of mobile user experience, with a design project underway to deliver a new experience in 2016.

Insight

Insight is a web based software solution designed to accelerate the delivery of our subscription products, automate reporting to customers and provide analytics on the delivery of our marketing campaigns.

Built with the Laravel PHP framework, a modern object oriented PHP backend serves data from a MongoDB database via a React user interface.

Insight was created last year (March 2015). Since then we have continued to enhance its role in the workflow of the production staff in MNA Digital, and added API connections to DFP, AdWords, Bing, Google Analytics, CentralIndex, Twilio and Mailgun.

Experiments

Building smaller concept sites to test new business models is also a core element of what we do. A great recent example is a modern social news and entertainment site called eyebally. Separated from our existing brands and local focus, eyebally is free to experiment with alternative approaches to user experience, content delivery and advertising.

Modern benefits

• Flexible working hours - around our core hours of 0930-1630
• Casual dress code - (just shirts rather than t-shirts really) and casual Fridays
• Free drinks machine - free coffee/tea/hot chocolate
• Choose-your-own-OS - anything stable which supports Vagrant and Virtual Box will be fine (We're all Mac, Suse or Ubuntu at the moment)
• Employee discount scheme
• Cycle to work scheme