A few months ago, I wrote about the Lede platform from Alley Interactive. They’ve helped launch the highly-successful Defector and Block Club Chicago sites.
One of the many things to admire about Lede is that they actively help journalists lead and own their work. This next quote is how Lede describe themselves:
Continue reading “Journalists Are Launching and Leading New WordPress Publishers”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 to lose one-third of all its newspapers by the end of next year.”
What does that mean for ordinary people? Here’s Medill again:
Continue reading “Local News is Dying and Being Reborn”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. If you try to edit a post at the same time as another user, you’ll see the message, “This post is already being edited.” You can either leave the post, or force the other person to stop editing.
That may change with the arrival of collaborative editing in WordPress.
Continue reading “Testing the New Collaborative Editing in the WordPress Block Editor”One of the key players in the WordPress publishing ecosystem is Newspack. They have a hosted service, but it’s also possible to download and use Newspack independently. The key Newspack plugins are all available on Github.
Over at PublishPress, we’ve been seeing some customers use Newspack on their own hosting. This led me to write a guide to using Newspack for self-hosted projects.
Continue reading “Newspack Can Do For Publishers What WooCommerce Did For eCommerce”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 and their connection clusters amongst local residents. Farmers in Nebraska are using fertilizers full of nitrate. That nitrate making people sick across the state and forcing local governments to spend millions of dollars to clean up their drinking water.
Continue reading “Nebraska’s FlatWater Free Press Gets in Good Trouble”