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I build content management systems, broadcast-grade digital platforms, and audience engagement infrastructure for media organisations, production houses, and broadcast operations.
What This Involves
Each component is designed to generate compounding results over time — not isolated deliverables that sit idle.
Custom CMS platforms built for the speed and complexity of media production — supporting video, audio, written content, and multi-format publishing.
Interactive digital experiences, community platforms, and engagement tools that build and retain loyal audiences.
Digital infrastructure built to the reliability and performance standards that broadcast and film production demand.
Multi-channel content distribution systems that push content to the right platforms, in the right format, at the right time.
Digital advertising infrastructure, sponsorship management, and revenue tracking systems for media businesses.
Digital tools for production scheduling, asset management, talent coordination, and post-production pipeline management.
Every engagement follows a structured, outcome-focused framework.
An honest, direct dialogue to establish whether the engagement makes sense for both parties. I listen, assess, and tell you plainly whether I am the right person to help.
A structured assessment producing a clear picture of what needs to be built, what it involves, and what it will cost. No surprises.
Projects scoped and delivered against defined outcomes. You have direct access to me throughout — no hand-offs, no disappearing acts.
The South African media landscape is contracting in some areas and expanding rapidly in others. Legacy broadcast and print operations are under sustained pressure from changing audience behaviour and declining advertising revenue. Digital-native media — newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, specialist online publications — is growing, sometimes dramatically, but typically without the institutional infrastructure that traditional media houses built over decades. I have worked on both sides of this landscape — I came from the film and production industry before transitioning to systems architecture, which gives me an unusual combination of production-process understanding and technical systems expertise. I know what a media operation actually looks like from inside, which means I can build systems that fit the actual workflow rather than a theorist's assumption of it. The common infrastructure deficit I see across media clients is the gap between the sophistication of the content being produced and the sophistication of the systems managing and distributing it. Broadcast-quality video content published to a website that loads slowly and has no structured data. Newsletter operations run through tools that cannot segment their lists or track engagement at the contact level. Production workflows managed in WhatsApp groups and personal email threads.
The platform layer is where most media organisations invest first — and often get wrong. A content management system for a media business is not a blogging platform. It needs to support multiple content types (text, video, audio, image galleries), multiple publication workflows (immediate publish, scheduled, embargo), multiple contributor roles with appropriate permissions, and integration with the distribution channels the audience actually uses. I build CMS platforms that match the actual publishing workflow — not the workflow of a hypothetical media business, but the specific workflow of the organisation I am working with, having mapped it in detail before writing a line of code. The audience layer — building and retaining a direct audience relationship — is where digital-native media organisations have a structural advantage. A newsletter with 10,000 engaged subscribers who have actively opted in to receive your content is more valuable than 100,000 social followers whose access is mediated by an algorithm. I build the infrastructure for direct audience relationships: email platforms properly configured with segmentation, automation, and deliverability foundations; membership or subscriber platforms for paid content; and community systems where appropriate. The revenue layer — monetising content and audience effectively — is where many media organisations leave money on the table. Direct advertising, programmatic display, sponsored content, membership subscriptions, events, and content licensing all require different technical infrastructure. I assess the revenue mix appropriate to the business and build the systems to support it.
Explore All Services
I work with headless CMS platforms (Sanity, Contentful, Payload) for organisations with complex content requirements, and WordPress with advanced configuration for organisations that need an accessible editorial interface. The choice depends on content type complexity, team technical comfort, and the distribution channels you need to support. I recommend against off-the-shelf media CMS products that lock you into proprietary platforms with limited integration options.
Yes. Subscription platforms for media typically involve gated content, subscriber authentication, payment integration (typically Stripe or a South African payment gateway), and integration with your email marketing platform. I build these as custom implementations on your domain rather than third-party platforms, which gives you full control of the data and the user experience.
Media SEO has unique characteristics: high content volume requires systematic management, news content has different ranking dynamics from evergreen content, and the competition for high-volume keywords is typically from established publishers with significant authority. The strategy I recommend starts with building authority on specific topic clusters where you have genuine editorial expertise, then expands as authority is established.
I can implement Google Ad Manager for direct advertising campaigns and integrate programmatic display through GAM's programmatic connections. For media businesses at scale, I recommend working with a specialist ad operations consultant alongside my platform work — the revenue optimisation side of programmatic requires sustained operational attention that sits outside my core engineering scope.
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Let's talk about what I can build for your organisation.