What Happened When 4 Small Publishers Moved to WordPress?

The Local Media Association is a trade group that focuses on the business side of local media. They try to help newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations grow their bottom line.

They’ve just put out a detailed report explaining what happened when several Black-owned local media outlets moved to WordPress and Newspack. This list shows the publishers involved in the project. Check out the history behind some of these organizations!

  1. New York Amsterdam News: Over 105 years old, it is one of the country’s oldest, continuously published African American newspapers.
  2. Houston Defender: Over 90 years old, it is Houston’s leading Black news source.
  3. The Washington Informer: Over 55 years old, it serves the African American community in Washington D.C. with over 50,000 readers of its weekly print edition.
  4. The Atlanta Voice: Over 50 years old, it is the largest audited African American community newspaper in Georgia with more than 600 print newspaper distribution locations.

These are publishers with enormous reach and significance, but often a lot of technical debt. Why did they move to WordPress?

Perhaps most compelling to the four publishers were the cost of entry and the premium migration service which removed many technical barriers to entry for newsrooms looking to leave their platform on a budget. Newspack aimed its price tiers to be economical enough to accommodate the budgets of small publishers.

The whole report is worth your time and does a good job of explaining why publishers choose WordPress and Newspack. The report was written about one year after the moves were complete.

This image below is taken from the report and shows the speed gains on the Houston Defender website. The pre-WordPress website is on the left and the new WordPress site is on the right.

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