“The logical solution was for newspapers to form groups and cooperate, establishing networks of reporters whose dispatches would be telegraphed back to a central office and then made available to all member newspapers.” I came across that quote from Tom Standage in his book “The Victorian Internet“. He was talking about the 1840s when news agencies like the…
Seth Rubenstein is the lead developer at Pew Research. He’s been talking lately about their adoption of Gutenberg Blocks for WordPress publishing. Seth started with a really interesting Twitter thread full of examples: “For all its naysayers Gutenberg is a game changer for digital news apps. Its a force multiplier for your team. We’ve spent…
A few months ago, I wrote about the Lede platform from Alley Interactive. They’ve helped launch the highly-successful Defector and Block Club Chicago sites. One of the many things to admire about Lede is that they actively help journalists lead and own their work. This next quote is how Lede describe themselves:
The Medill School of Journalism put out their annual “State of Local News Project” this week. Yes, local news is dying. Here’s a quote from Medill: “Since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers. The nation is on pace to lose one-third of all its newspapers by the end of next year.” What does…
We’re excited to share some cool news about our most popular plugin, PublishPress Capabilities. This helpful tool gives you super-detailed control over who can do what on your WordPress site. PublishPress Capabilities now shows you the capabilities for many free and commercial plugins, from Yoast and Rank Math to Learn Dash and Gravity Forms.
Most publishers we’ve worked with do not use WordPress to write their content. They prefer platforms such as Google Drive because they can collaborate in real-time. They do this because currently it’s not possible to collaborate on content inside WordPress. If you try to edit a post at the same time as another user, you’ll…
One of the key players in the WordPress publishing ecosystem is Newspack. They have a hosted service, but it’s also possible to download and use Newspack independently. The key Newspack plugins are all available on Github. Here at PublishPress, we’ve been seeing some customers use Newspack on their own hosting. This led me to write…
The Last Modified Date is a key feature on many websites. This can be a helpful feature if you want people to know when the post was updated. I’ve seen this used for news articles, documentation, and even legal and technical information. The Last Modified Date does not appear by default on most WordPress sites….
There’s a fascinating story around the work of Flatwater Free Press (FFP), a WordPress publisher in Nebraska. Yanqi Xu is a reporter for FFP. She won a national award for “Our Dirty Water”, a series about Nebraska’s high nitrate levels and their connection clusters amongst local residents. Farmers in Nebraska are using fertilizers full of…
Last month, I wrote about the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress sites. ActivityPub could form the basis for a new social network with your WordPress site as your profile. The time is right to explore alternatives because social media is abandoning publishers. As you’ve probably heard, the Twitter is now called X, and it’s not very…