The Medill School of Journalism put out their annual “State of Local News Project” this week. Yes, local news is dying. Here’s a quote from Medill: “Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. The nation is on pace…
Most publishers we’ve worked with do not use WordPress to write their content. They prefer platforms such as Google Drive because they can collaborate in real-time. They do this because currently it’s not possible to collaborate on content inside WordPress.…
There’s a fascinating story around the work of Flatwater Free Press (FFP), a WordPress publisher in Nebraska. Yanqi Xu is a reporter for FFP. She won a national award for “Our Dirty Water”, a series about Nebraska’s high nitrate levels…
WordPress is a platform that focuses on publishers. The project’s mission is to “Democratize Publishing“. However, WordPress does lack some key features that most publishers need. One of these missing features is custom statuses. The current choice for WordPress users…
Last month, I wrote about the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress sites. ActivityPub could form the basis for a new social network with your WordPress site as your profile. The time is right to explore alternatives because social media is abandoning…
Over 10 years ago, I wrote a post with this title: “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress“. In that post I pointed out that WordPress had almost all the features needed to build a social platform and…
Thursday, September 7 was a very interesting day for WordPress publishing. We saw a significant investment in the space, with the promise of more to come.
There are a ton of collaborations happening between smaller publishers at the moment. Two or three journalists don’t have the resources to tackle big topics, but they can when they work on stories together. I find out about many of…
In July, WordPress saw off a strong potential competitor when the Chorus CMS shut down. In August, another competitor continues to quickly fade away. The Washington Post laid off more staff from its Arc XP platform: Last year, the Post…
“Time to Read” offers a feature that you see on many newspaper sites. This feature is available in WordPress now if you’re using the separate Gutenberg plugin. It may be officially added to the WordPress core in a future release.