Boom 93 is a local outlet in Požarevac, Serbia, on air and online. Reaching a local audience was never their problem. Holding its attention in a feed competing with every national and global outlet was.
Local news only matters if it's actually local
If you live in Požarevac, you probably have BBC or CNN for global news, and N1 or RTS for national headlines. You're covered. What you usually don't have is a reliable way to know what is happening in your own street or neighbourhood without scrolling through irrelevant info.
That was the main challenge when we started developing the new web and mobile experience for Boom 93. They didn't want just another news portal; they wanted a platform that changes based on where the user is standing.
Here is how we used our mPanel CMS to build a system that prioritises geo-location over breaking news.
Geo-targeting as a functional tool
Most apps use location just to show you the weather. We wanted to use it to clean up the user's feed.
Using mPanel, Boom 93 editors don't just categorise news by topic; they define a GPS coordinate and a radius for stories. That creates a dynamic app structure:
- Smart feeds. A user in Požarevac gets a completely different homepage and menu than a user in Velika Plana. The app filters out the noise automatically. Technically, we handle the location sorting on our end, not on the user's device — which protects battery life, because the app only receives the news meant for that location rather than downloading everything and sorting it locally.
- Expansion ready. Boom 93 can cover multiple towns from a single CMS instance without the app feeling cluttered or heavy for the end user.
Solving the push notification spam problem
Push notifications are the fastest way to lose a user if you abuse them. Nobody wants their phone buzzing for a traffic jam in a city 50km away.
We built the notification engine to respect the radius logic set in the CMS. When an editor sends an alert, the system checks the user's location.
- If it affects you, you get the alert.
- If it doesn't, silence.
That keeps the unsubscribe rate low, because every notification offers actual value to the person receiving it.
Keeping users in the app: radio and quizzes
Getting users to open the app is step one. Keeping them there requires more than text.
The radio player. We integrated a live radio stream that works seamlessly in the background. Users can browse news, check the weather, or lock their phones while the radio keeps playing. It turns the app into a utility, not just a reader.
The quizzes. Boom 93 has been a rock station in Požarevac for decades, and its listeners know the catalogue. So the quizzes are about rock music - which sounds like a small detail until you consider that it gives a local news app a reason to be opened by someone who isn't currently looking for news.
Instead of manual entry, we built a bulk-import feature letting the editorial team upload 500+ questions from an Excel file. The system then:
- Randomises questions weekly so content stays fresh.
- Enforces time limits on answers to prevent Googling.
- Maintains ranking lists based on points.
It's a simple, honest way to build a community habit without over-engineering the process.
Why we use mPanel
We built Boom 93 on our own mPanel CMS because standard platforms like WordPress often struggle with this specific mix of geo-logic and mobile-first features.
mPanel lets us deploy these modules (geo-fencing, e-paper readers, complex notification rules) out of the box. It gives local media the kind of tech stack usually reserved for big national players, while keeping the workflow simple enough for a small editorial team to manage daily.
Boom 93's website and app both run on it, with geo-fencing, notification rules, the radio player and the quiz module all configured from the same admin.