We get to help build Newspack, and it’s gonna be great
Billy Penn could have used Newspack.
When we launched our scrappy local news startup in Philadelphia back in 2014, we knew a few things about what we wanted to do, but there was way, way more we didn’t. What platform did we want to use? A version of WordPress. How it would make enough money to pay for itself? We had some ideas, but we needed data and time. How it would keep pace with a shifting landscape, much less adapt more quickly than our contemporaries? The last one, we’d worry about if we lived long enough to answer the money one.
Four (and change) years later, we’ve won some battles of survival, though we’ve not made it through unscarred. Through investment and a merger, and a revenue pivot or two, we’ve grown to three locations and learned a lot about what it takes to run a newsroom in a major American city. And, thanks to this new initiative with Google, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the News Revenue Hub, the Knight Foundation and Wordpress.com, we’re excited to help other people get on this platform in the new year.
The project itself, dubbed Newspack, will give a lucky dozen sites the chance to pilot this new Wordpress.com-built platform in the first half of 2019, and more than 50 to use it in the second half of the year. The goal of the project is, according to the official announcement, to “develop an advanced open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations, which will be developed on its cloud-based platform and incorporate many of the best practices in digital publishing.”
And it’s true that small newsrooms like Billy Penn, and Spirited’s sister newsrooms in Pittsburgh and Denver, often struggle with everything that goes along with 21st century publishing: Picking a CMS and a hosting solution, keeping everything up-to-date, fending off hackers and bots, and everything else. That’s also not counting the fight for revenue; after all, journalism’s not free! So building a revenue solution — in our case, membership, thanks in no small part to our friends and partners in this project over at the News Revenue Hub — was also incredibly important to us, and the lessons we’re learning in that battle will be part of this implementation, too.
So Newspack by WordPress.com will help small digital publishers (hello!) by providing a new, affordable system with the best editorial and business practices from across the industry. We could have used it! The second-best thing, of course, is being involved in providing it to other publishers like us. We’re thrilled to get started.
