Block Club Chicago is a start-up with a very specific name and mission: they focus on block-level news in Chicago neighborhoods. They launched via a Kickstarter campaign and now get 70 percent of their annual revenue directly from readers through…
Fresnoland launches today in the San Joaquin Valley of California. This start-up is supported by Newspack (an Automattic project). Here’s the Fresnoland team’s description of their aims: “Fresnoland exists to make policy public – by, for, and with all residents…
Happy 5th birthday to MLK50, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis whose WordPress-based site serves low-income residents. Here’s how the MLK50 team describe what they do: “Our nonprofit news outlet in Memphis focuses on the intersection of poverty, power and policy.…
The Current is a WordPress-based news startup out of Louisiana. They just broke a big story about corruption in St. Martin Parish outside of Lafayette. The story was reported by one of the startup’s founders who dug into the paperwork…
If you run a newspaper or magazine site, there may be a lot of activity with authors, editors, and also ordinary users. It’s important for publishers to have an accurate way to track who is making changes on their site.…
Seth Rubenstein is the lead developer at the Pew Research Center and he posted a very interesting Twitter thread on their use of WordPress and Gutenberg: “For all its naysayers Gutenberg is a game changer for digital news apps. Its…
It’s worth checking out Human Made’s review of their TechCrunch redesign. The new site is headless and required them to build a whole lot of new tools. The review has Github links to all the tools used during the build…
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…