Time.com is one of the most high-profile media sites in the world. You can see their listing on the WordPress showcase. At the beginning of June, Time dropped its paywall ,which means that everyone can browse over 100 years’ worth of archived content. The site’s paywall was twelve years old. Axios has a good, short…
This is the fourt time we’ve hosted “WP Publisher Sessions”, where we explore how publishers can grow their audience and revenue. This week we invited Louis Nicholls of Sparkloop to chat with us about how Sparkloop helps newsletter publishers grow. He also breaks down what are the growth channels and strategies that are working right…
Pluribus News is a new start-up which is aiming to cover every state government across the United States. Pluribus launches with 6 staff members. The founder Reid Wilson worked at The Washington Post and The Hill newspaper. The other staff also join from The Hill and other papers in Washington DC. The initial plan is…
Vince Dice is the editor of Gig Harbor Now, a nonprofit news organization in Gig Harbor, near Seattle. His publication is celebrating its first birthday this week and he has interesting story to tell, that sums up many trends with local news in 2022. For many years, Vince was connected to a newspaper called “Gig…
For several years, I’ve been blogging here on PublishPress about the explosion in local news publishers. Initially that was driven by a gut-feeling that something exciting is in the early, formative stages. These publishers are mostly non-profit, mission-driven, and powered by WordPress. There’s now data to back that up: The Institute for Non-Profit News is…
Over at LeakyPaywall, Peter Ericson has a great article on whether you should offer a subscription level that hides ads. His main example is Samsnytt, a WordPress-based publisher from Sweden. Samsnytt tries to upsell users to a special plan with an “ad-free experience”.
Poynter has a detailed article on revenue for Civil Beat, which is a WordPress-based news startup in Hawaii. The site had initially launched with a paywall but found that it was not successful for them:
We have the opportunity for you: The Cordova Times is 108 year old WordPress-based local newspaper and it is available for free. The small weekly in remote South-Central Alaska (only accessible by boat or plane) has won a lot of awards including “Alaska’s Best Weekly” for two years in a row. The newspaper is owned…
The Nieman Lab has a story up today about what it’s like to launch a newspaper. The writer launched his paper called Lookout in California 18 months ago and has an interesting story to tell. They aren’t using WordPress, but he’s part of a group of publishing start-ups and many of them are, including LBPost.com…
There’s a WordPress-based publisher that has been filling up my news feed with a medical insurance story today: Here’s the story: “Need an organ transplant in Mississippi? You may be out of luck thanks to an insurance dispute“ Mississippi Today is a non-profit that started in 2016 with a focus on statehouse government. They’ve grown…