The open-source CMS WordPress is one of the most popular, having powered about one-third of the web.
To streamline newsrooms, it is committed to help small and medium-sized publishers with 'Newspack by WordPress.com'. The toolkit is meant to help streamline those businesses' technical decisions, by addressing some of the persistent obstacles to creating economically sustainable models for journalism, particularly at the local level.
This includes common hurdles in development, optimization, and monetization.
With Newspack, news organizations can focus on what they do best: investigating and publishing stories, allowing those publishers to hit the ground running with less frictions.
According to CEO and News Revenue Hub founder Mary Walter-Brown:
"They’re also not always optimized for lead generation or fundraising. Over time it becomes extremely difficult for them to grow audience and serve their readers. It also makes it difficult to implement any kind of reader revenue program — like membership."
The project is led by Kinsey Wilson, who is a journalist and digital media executive, and also WordPress.com’s president.
And WordPress here, is working with the News Revenue Hub and Spirited Media as development partners. The aim is for six news sites to use Newspack in the first six months of 2019, with 50 more websites migrating in the second half of the year.
Calls for platform teamwork are nothing new. But having someone to lead the partnership from the tech side with digital partners is indeed unusual.
This is because before joining Automattic, WordPress’s parent company in February 2018, Wilson has previously worked with The New York Times and USA Today.
He said that:
"It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time."
"It’s not rocket science to put a CMS together. It is a bit of rocket science to figure out how to make the most effective use of it and create a sustainable business model."
As the most popular CMS for the web, WordPress is flexible and sufficient for most newsroom use-cases. But with more than 54,000 plugins, tens of thousands of theme options and endless ways to customize them, newbie publishers are faced with a lot of choices.
This can be confusing as figuring out which plugins to use out of that many can be cumbersome. It can be difficult for them to know where to get started for those whose primary expertise isn’t in development.
To address these concerns, Wilson and the team of developers are also putting together a set of plugins, adding automatic backups, anti-spam features, and host some other tools to get newsrooms up and running with as little friction as possible.
Newspack is funded with $2.4 million from the Google News Intiative ($1.2 million), the Lenfest Institute ($400,000), the Knight Foundation ($250,000), an academic partner ($200,000), Consensys, the cryptocurrency venture group that backed blockchain startup Civil Media ($350,000) and more.
Publishing partners who apply by February 1, can use this Newspack for free during the grant period, which runs until January 2020. Once the period runs out, Newspack comes with a price tag between $1,000 and $2,000 depending on the size of the news organization.
While the internet business is growing, the audiences are facing an increasing number of choices. This results in poor engagement and time on site.
As readership wanes, there hasn't been any internet phenomenon that could help publishers in facing this challenge. As years go, some websites devoted to local news were shuttered claiming that they couldn't see a profit.
The rest that survived, many have turned their strategies to brand journalism and online newsroom to get their stories out. But in the era where people spread too many fake news and hoaxes, legitimate publishers are facing hot tempered, distrustful public environment.
Companies that have contributed to the gutting of local news media, said that they want to undo the damage, and help those publishers in need, to survive.