Featured NGN Stories

The Featured NGN Stories block began with a simple editorial challenge. Some campus teams wanted to feature stories from Northeastern Global News (NGN) on their websites, but keeping that content current often meant manually recreating and republishing stories across multiple platforms.

Rather than duplicating content, I worked with the NGN team’s lead developer to integrate directly with their public API. The goal was to surface NGN content within NU Start while preserving a single source of truth for publishing and maintenance.

What made the project particularly successful was not the complexity of the integration, but the foundation it was built upon. By leveraging the content presentation framework already established through the Dynamic Content Grid system, the integration required very little new infrastructure. Content could be retrieved from an external source, mapped into existing presentation patterns, and displayed through a familiar editorial experience.

Editors could add the block to a page, configure a small number of display options, and automatically surface current NGN stories without ongoing maintenance or manual content duplication.

The project demonstrated one of the primary goals of NU Start: invest in shared systems that make future solutions easier to build. What could have become a custom integration for a single use case instead became a reusable feature that continues to power content experiences across Northeastern websites.