Newspack

A new publishing solution for news orgs by WordPress

1 follower

A new publishing solution for news orgs by WordPress

1 follower

The parent company of WordPress.com is joining with other news industry leaders to develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations. The effort is designed to address some of the persistent obstacles to creating economically sustainable models for journalism, particularly at the local level.

Launch tags:News•Writing•Search

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Sounds, essentially, like a sponsored/subsidized, hosted, distribution of WordPress: Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems. Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them. So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers. It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it "an opinionated CMS:” it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.

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8yr ago

@chrismessina Does it? What about: "The effort will be fully funded by Automattic through the development period (which extends through Jan. 2020). After that, operating fees of between $1,000 per month and $2,000 per month will be applied to participating sites." So you pay $1,000 to $2,000 and get what in return? What am I missing?

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8yr ago

@chrismessina Sounds pretty decent. Matt's gotten us this far, perhaps a nice complement to publishing on other platforms like Medium with better off-platform distribution. Looks cool!

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8yr ago

yclas

@chrismessina @wpezdeveloper exactly the same I have thought...

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8yr ago

FamSnap

@wpezdeveloper Yeah at that rate, I'd rather spend a few grand up front to have someone build a simple wordpress solution rather than pay 12-24k per year for this.

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8yr ago

@chrismessina @wpezdeveloper Certainly a valid question! With Newspack we see the value as larger than the costs associated with hosting, basic maintenance and customization. Our aim is to produce an "opinionated" product based on industry expertise that communicates, supports, and guides towards publishing best practices across the board. We hope to earn the trust of our customers, freeing them up to focus on journalism without spending mental and financial resources maintaining their digital stack. Automattic has been working closely with small and large publishers for over a decade now, so we know the depth of support and service required to help make a news org successful both as an editorial team and as a business.

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8yr ago

But does it come with the new Gutenberg editor? Cause as far as I've noticed most writers don't like it because it breaks the flow.

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8yr ago

Canadian Tech Podcast: Ep. 88 - Shomi A Comet

@tostartafire While I have my doubts about Newspack's actual usefulness, and was skeptical of Gutenberg because of the outrage I originally heard, I've grown used to it and quite like it. The user flow was different and had a small learning curve, of course, but I find it lets me write and write and then I can easily go back later and modify individual blocks because a new one has been made every time I hit `Enter`.

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8yr ago