The Times is nearly 250 years old and is one of the most famous newspapers in the UK. It has a sister paper called The Sunday Times which publishes only once per week.
In recent years, The Times has focused on digital growth and their audience on TheTimes.co.uk is now four times greater than their print readership.
Starting in 2019, the Times introduced WordPress around the edges of their tech platform. They enjoyed using WordPress so much that by November 2023, they had completely switched to WordPress.
This information comes from their presentation at the “WordPress for Enterprise” event. You can click here to watch a replay of the presentation.
The presentation is well worth 30 minutes of your time if you’re interested in WordPress and publishing. They give good examples of interface that the Times journalist use, plus integrations with DeskNet, Brightcove, and more.
If you want to see more, the Big Bite agency has a case study with more details on key aspects of the project. For example, they talk about an “Editorial Notes” plugin that allows writers to add, edit, reply to or delete comments on posts. To make the comments easier to navigate, writers can see a timeline of all the comments for each article. Those comments can be filtered by type, such as legal, corporate, etc.
I expect we’ll see a lot more details from The Times and Big Bite over the next few months. For example, Jamie Marsland, a popular WordPress YouTuber, promises a video with Big Bite about the project coming soon. I’ll add that video to this post as soon it goes live.
The tech team at the The Times certainly aren’t standing still – they are already starting to add AI features to their WordPress workflow by building their own large language model (LLM), trained on the newspaper’s own content.
