Happy 5th birthday to MLK50, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis whose WordPress-based site serves low-income residents. Here’s how the MLK50 team describe what they do: “Our nonprofit news outlet in Memphis focuses on the intersection of poverty, power and policy. We examine the systems that make it hard for workers to make ends meet and…
The Current is a WordPress-based news startup out of Louisiana. They just broke a big story about corruption in St. Martin Parish outside of Lafayette. The story was reported by one of the startup’s founders who dug into the paperwork to find millions of dollars of illegally granted contracts. Click here to read the full…
One of the ideas behind PublishPress is that lot of innovation is happening with publishing, and that much of it happening on WordPress. I came across this launch of a new WordPress-based business newspaper in India: https://businessguardian.in. It turns out to be part of a entire WordPress-based media ecosystem owned by the ITV network, publishing…
Normally old newspapers try to start websites. This story goes in the opposite direction. The Stroud Times is a U.K.-based WordPress site started in 2020 and is now expanding to a physical version: “Readers are fed up with doom and gloom stories, we pride ourselves in being the beacon for positive news and engaging human interest…
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:
Here’s some encouraging WordPress-powered publishing news out of Baltimore: “A team of journalists and nonprofit practitioners … announced today the return of Baltimore Beat, a Black-led, Black-controlled nonprofit newspaper and online outlet.” The website will launch later in 2022 at https://baltimorebeat.com. Here’s some background from Baltimore Magazine, another local WordPress site: The Baltimore Beat, which…
Racket is a really interesting start-up publisher out of Minnesota. They call themselves “writer-owned, reader-funded” which sounds like a very good pathway for a lot of news start-ups. They use WordPress with Pico for payments:
Sarah Gooding from WPTavern published an awesome article on local newspapers in West Virginia. With all the talk of big money in WordPress and big tech in general, it’s great to see people like Tyler Channell focus on real problems and real solutions like this. Here’s the description of Tyler’s WordPress-powered PaywallProject:
One of the ideas behind PublishPress is that local publishers are successfully finding new business models, often powered by WordPress. Here’s some data to back that up from LION, a group that supports local publishers: annual revenue went up by 33% between 2020 and 2021. Most local publishers get by on revenue of just over…
Here’s another very useful WordPress publishing podcast: “Jeremy Green of Endo Creative and Leaky Paywall shares his thoughts on “why WordPress is a great choice for content publishers seeking to monetize with digital subscriptions, plus his favorite techniques for subscriptions.”