Katie Couric Media (KCM) was founded in 2017 by award-winning journalist Katie Couric and her husband, John Molner. Together, they identified a void in the media landscape and set out to help brands amplify their values and cultivate an engaged audience through authentic storytelling.

KCM initially published its content through third party platforms such as YouTube and iHeart Radio. After years of building a dedicated audience, KCM decided it was time to anchor this effort in a holistic design system and bring together its offering in one unique online destination. To help them take on this task they approached Decimal to design and build their website.

Today, the site and identity have become a catalyst for growth. The site serves more than three million users monthly and has helped grow their mailing list to million members. Early and renewed focus on SEO have created a very healthy organic digital channel.

KCM content is created to spark curiosity, elevate conversations, inspire action, and move the world forward. After a comprehensive brand audit and strategic exercises that helped define KCM, we began to craft the brand’s visual identity elements — logo, typography, grid, color usage, photography, and illustration style — to communicate the KCM personality.

KCM is built using a monolithic Wordpress architecture, hosted on Pantheon and replicated globally via our CDN Fastly. With a growing international audience, we’re starting to make use of edge functions for content personalization in order to achieve higher engagement. The platform hosts monthly live video events where Katie and her team conduct interviews for anyone to view. All editorial content is fed to Google News and Apple News as additional distribution channels. The site is fully WCAG AA and GDPR compliant.

With 1M+ subscribers, KCM’s daily newsletter, “Wake-up Call,” gives readers updates on the news that matters most to them directly from Katie Couric.

We built the KCM Brand Book to allow the company to grow in a seamless fashion. These guidelines have helped maintain a strong identity and ensured consistent implementation of brand elements as KCM continues to expand.