Civil to be natively integrated into Newspack by WordPress.com, a new toolkit to support news organizations
New sustainability effort from Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com), along with Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub, and with funding from ConsenSys, Lenfest Institute, Knight Foundation and Google
Civil will be a key element of a new local news initiative led by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. Via WordPress, Automattic will launch Newspack, an open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations. It will be especially focused on smaller- and medium-sized organizations that specialize in local news. According to the official Newspack announcement, “The effort is designed to address some of the persistent obstacles to creating economically sustainable models for journalism, particularly at the local level.”
It’s an exciting development for Civil, and promises to help support a large number of new newsrooms in our community. Any news organization who uses this new, newsroom-focused WordPress platform will have seamless access to Civil’s Publisher tools, which allow Newsrooms to permanently archive content in decentralized, tamper-proof storage environments and which will introduce new licensing and syndication opportunities for publishers and creators. It will also allow news organizations to apply to the Civil Registry, the community-managed hub that lists the newsrooms who have been vetted for producing ethical journalism and who make up the Civil network.
“We’re building a community of independent newsrooms from around the world and making it easy for them to access emerging technologies that can help with sustainability and engagement initiatives,” said Matthew Iles, chief executive officer at Civil, which will be natively integrated into the new Wordpress platform. “Automattic has a deep commitment to promoting the use of open source in media. Our mission is to use open source technologies to help support a large and diverse network of quality news organizations around the world, and we can imagine no better partner in this initiative.”
In addition to the participating sponsors at Lenfest, Knight Foundation and Google, we’re especially grateful to the role that ConsenSys, our own investor and close partner, played in making this a reality. The media industry has emerged as one of the most exciting areas for experimenting with blockchain-based technologies, and this is a major step forward in that regard.
For news organizations: Automattic is looking for pilot partners to be among the first to use Newspack. You can learn more about the application process, which closes on February 1, at https://newspack.blog/.
Those interested in learning how to join the Civil community can do so at www.civil.co.
