INN Reports Strong Growth for Local News Startups Using WordPress

For five years now, the Institute for Nonprofit News has produce an annual report on the nonprofit news sector. Their 2022 report shows that independent local news is growing strongly. Here are 3 key points from the report:

Since 2017, more than 135 nonprofit news outlets have launched. The number of newsrooms in the INN Network has doubled over the past four years and now exceeds 400 independent news organizations.

More than half of the news outlets that have launched since 2017 are local. Today, roughly 4 in 10 nonprofit news organizations are local, up from about 2 in 10 in 2017.

Nonprofit news is driving sustained, multi-year revenue growth. Two-thirds of news outlets surveyed increased their revenue, with a median of 25% growth during the last four years.

WordPress is the dominant platform for this local news growth. WordPress-powered publishers in this year’s report include Dallas Free Press, Charlottesville Tomorrow, Canopy Atlanta, The Daily Yonder, and more.

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How Pew Research Use Gutenberg Blocks for Publishing

Seth Rubenstein is the lead developer at Pew Research. He’s been talking lately about their adoption of Gutenberg Blocks for WordPress publishing.

Seth started with a really interesting Twitter thread full of examples:

“For all its naysayers Gutenberg is a game changer for digital news apps. Its a force multiplier for your team. We’ve spent the last 3 years going “all in” on block development. Here’s a little thread of what’s possible with the right investment into Gutenberg..”

Next, Seth took part in an interview that showcased his team’s work with Gutenberg blocks. The practical part of this video starts at the 13 minute mark. If you’re considering using blocks for WordPress publishing, this video is absolutely worth your time.

Seth and his colleague Michael Piccorossi show how they use a mixture of core and custom blocks to build their entire site. They have built custom blocks to create powerful charts and quizzes.

“Thank With Google” Is Coming to WordPress Soon

Mark Root-Wiley builds WordPress websites for nonprofits. He’s also a member of the Post Status community for WordPress professionals.

In the Post Status community, Mark recently shared some interesting changes he had seen in Google’s popular Site Kit plugin for WordPress. Apparently Google is about to launch a new “Thank With Google” payments option for WordPress sites. Mark found some Github issues that referenced the new project (#5366, #5365, #5364 ) and he shared these thoughts:

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How One WordPress Agency is Supporting Indie Journalism

Blake Bertuccelli runs a WordPress agency called Decubing, based out of New Orleans. Blake recently announced that his agency will be donating 11% of their revenue to organizations that support independent journalism.

The first donation was to the Prison Journalism Project (PJP). The PJP migrated to Newspack in October 2021.

You can click here to read Blake’s announcement. I also asked Blake some brief questions about this move:

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Create Magazines and Newspaper Issues in WordPress With PublishPress Series

One thing we all know about magazines is that they come out in issues. Normally, they have monthly or weekly issues with a selection of topical content. If you want to do that in WordPress, the best plugin is PublishPress Series.

The PublishPress Series plugin

Magazines organized content into issues because it’s valuable. Issues can be packaged up and sold. In many cases, serialized content isn’t packaged properly, making it confusing, even boring. But that won’t happen when you rely on PublishPress Series.

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