Work / The Portager
A local newsroom,on its own platform.
A new publishing platform, a membership migration with no interruption for readers, and newsletters run from Pulse.
The company
The Portager is an independent, reader-supported local news publication covering Portage County, Ohio. It publishes daily online, sends free and paid newsletters and offers membership plans.
The project
Since January 2025 we have built and run The Portager’s platform: the website, member accounts and paywall, newsletters, analytics and the migration of its membership business from Memberful to Stripe.
What we did
Publishing platform
Astro, server-rendered on Cloudflare Workers, with React components, a PostgreSQL database and built-in authentication. Articles, authors, ads and sponsors are managed in Pulse. Upgraded to Astro 7 and Node 24 in 2026 with production errors remediated.
Membership migration
Native accounts with magic-link and password sign-in, Stripe Checkout, customer portal and signed webhooks. A fail-closed entitlement resolver handles paid, complimentary, dependent, temporary and manual memberships, and a 30-day paywall protects recent articles. The release went from canary to open with an approved per-member ledger.
Newsletters in Pulse
A newsletter editor with free and paid versions, authenticated preferences, a public archive that respects entitlements, draft previews and a deduplicated import of the previous mailing list.
Security and observability
Input hardening, bounded request bodies and structured logs with redaction and request IDs. The dependency audit went from 60 advisories to zero.
Business intelligence
Metabase dashboards for email performance and business metrics, drawing on first-party pageviews, identified readers and custom events such as paywall hits and newsletter sign-ups.
Pulse at the centre
Pulse is the operational source of truth: articles, authors, ads, users, subscriptions, newsletter editions, email templates and the event flows that keep Stripe, the website and the newsroom in step. The website reads and writes operational data only through Pulse.
ReachOut Pulse is the central data platform we build and run for our clients: first-party web analytics, contacts and segments, email campaigns, automations, assets and content in one organisation-scoped place. People use it in the Studio, systems use it through a REST API, and AI agents use it through an MCP server, with people approving the calls that matter.
AI in the workflow
Pulse’s daily Insights, which use a language model to explain unusual traffic and engagement patterns, were validated on an anonymised sample of The Portager’s analytics before release. An MCP connector gives agents read access to the publication’s Pulse data for assisted operations.
Outcomes
What changed,in numbers.
Figures from the migration close-out of 28 August 2026 and the analytics validation snapshot of September 2026.
- 1,065
- members moved to Stripe without interruption
- 1,076
- subscriptions migrated with verified schedules
- 60 → 0
- open security advisories after hardening
- 23.8%
- unique open rate on the latest large newsletter
- 8.7%
- unique click rate on the same send
- > 60 s → 1 s
- dashboard queries after repair
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