Normally old newspapers try to start websites. This story goes in the opposite direction. The Stroud Times is a U.K.-based WordPress site started in 2020 and is now expanding to a physical version: “Readers are fed up with doom and…
Poynter has a detailed article on revenue for Civil Beat, which is a WordPress-based news startup in Hawaii. The site had initially launched with a paywall but found that it was not successful for them: Civil Beat went with a…
Here’s some encouraging WordPress-powered publishing news out of Baltimore: “A team of journalists and nonprofit practitioners … announced today the return of Baltimore Beat, a Black-led, Black-controlled nonprofit newspaper and online outlet.” The website will launch later in 2022 at…
Racket is a really interesting start-up publisher out of Minnesota. They call themselves “writer-owned, reader-funded” which sounds like a very good pathway for a lot of news start-ups. They use WordPress with Pico for payments: Here’s their “why” behind the…
Sarah Gooding from WPTavern published an awesome article on local newspapers in West Virginia. With all the talk of big money in WordPress and big tech in general, it’s great to see people like Tyler Channell focus on real problems…
One of the ideas behind KinshiPress is that local publishers are successfully finding new business models, often powered by WordPress. Here’s some data to back that up from LION, a group that supports local publishers: annual revenue went up by…
Here’s another very useful WordPress publishing podcast: “Jeremy Green of Endo Creative and Leaky Paywall shares his thoughts on “why WordPress is a great choice for content publishers seeking to monetize with digital subscriptions, plus his favorite techniques for subscriptions.”
Neighborhood Journal is a really interesting experiment in New Mexico, and it is using WordPress of course. It’s a new digital news product that focuses on neighborhood-level news in three “zones” in Albuquerque. The publication aims to foster a “community…
The Washington City Paper newspaper is ending its print edition after 41 years. The paper lives on via a member-supported WordPress site now. The City Paper team published a long and beautifully-written article about the transition from print to digital:…
This article from Nieman Lab is a good summary of why local publishers matter (and WordPress is their main tool). The article is a summary of a research paper. To sum it up in a sentence: When papers are sold…