Comments on: Journalism and Newspack

By: The Future of WordPress for Publishers: Newspack – Coast Digital – doMAINLY

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 17:46:09 +0000

[…] Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO wrote on his blog: […]

By: arena

arena — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 10:20:18 +0000

GDPR was a big concern for WordPress last year.
Using this wonderful tool, we are in contact with wordpress.org several times a day :
* browsing wordpress.org websites
* checking for new wordpress, themes, plugins updates
* under admin, ajax calls like “heartbeat” with its “has_focus” parameter
* loading things from s.w.org
and certainly much more.
So my question is this, does wordpress.org have a dpo (data protection officer) ?

By: LRS

LRS — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 19:29:57 +0000

This looks pretty cool. I’ve been following what’s going on with the blockchain-based newsrooms under Civil. Interested to find out more and maybe of some use/service. Thanks for all you do!

By: Dominik

Dominik — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 08:25:45 +0000

Probably not the best name if you want this to work in German-speaking countries as well.

By: Christian D.

Christian D. — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:49:42 +0000

Matt,
As someone who used to work in the newspaper CMS business this is interesting to hear. I’ve long thought that WordPress could support newspapers websites and if the newspaper could handle it technically feed their layout production (mostly InDesign but that’s probably in flux as well as Adobe Subscription fees are probably a bit steep for some papers; Bangor Maine has a tech person using WP to flow into InDesign…or did).
Just a few other random comments about the market that you are going into (I used to work for TownNews which will be one of the competitors to this product).

– Pricing might be a sticking point at $1000-$2000 (I think the ‘large’ package at TownNews starts at like $1500 a month (goes up with storage etc etc). If that can be offset with bringing in more advertising that might help sell…but….
– A lot of smaller newspapers don’t have staff that fully understand digital sales. There are some outstanding organizations that do and it’s changing all the time. I think this is an area, revenue, where a lot of time needs to be spent. I ran a newspaper website for about 7 years (after TownNews) and I thought we did an okay job at getting advertising on the site and on our best days we were making $5K a month. That’s maybe one full time job…
– Will this have a classified system (perhaps some new thought to that?). E-Edition? Most smaller papers are going to be looking for an all in one solution. Better if it can hook into their layout system.

I could probably go on and on with this as it’s something I’ve put a good amount of time thinking about. I don’t have a solution for it, but have some ideas. One of the biggest things I think is getting newspapers to evolve…and it’s happening but it’s slow going.

By: DJ Johnny Medley

DJ Johnny Medley — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:00:47 +0000

Tried to send this to you on your Birthday, Matt: Of the 13 candidates running for mayor in next month’s Chicago election, 11 have websites. Of those 11, nine are using WordPress. That amounts to 81.81818181818182%, a very cool number! Cheers!!!

By: DJ Johnny Medley

DJ Johnny Medley — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 16:55:59 +0000

That is fantastic news. Congratulations!