A review of Bylines for multi-author and guest-author posts
Meet the successor to Co-Authors Plus. It’s for multiple authors and guest authors in WordPress without creating additional user accounts.
Publish tickets, initial speakers, sponsors
I’m super excited to finally be able to say that tickets for Publish 2017 are available. The event, as many of you already know, is in Atlanta, on August 3rd and 4th. That’s a Thursday and Friday. Go straight to the ticket purchase area if you want to skip the pitch. It’s being held at…
Laura Hazard Owen wrote another great…
Laura Hazard Owen wrote another great post on Nieman Lab, this time closer to home. She featured Longreads, the member-driven journalism site Automattic acquired in 2014. I learned a few things from this feature, including that Automattic is matching $3 for every dollar that comes in from memberships. They also now spend all revenue on…
Launched in 2013 in The Netherlands,…
Launched in 2013 in The Netherlands, De Correspondent is funded solely by its members: 56,000 of them, who pay about $63 a year because they believe in the kind of journalism that is done by its 21 full-time correspondents and 75 freelancers. The leaders of the site announced today that they will soon expand to…
Interesting announcement from Ghost: they have…
Interesting announcement from Ghost: they have created a $45,000 journalism development program “to help build new and exciting publications”. They are looking for 3 teams to work with for the next year, and will be offering financial and technical support. The $45,000 is in Ghost(Pro) credit, along with access to their internal tools, data, and…
The role of blogs at The New York Times
I really enjoyed a throwback piece on Nieman Lab today, where Joseph Lichterman reminisced with some New York Times folks about the earliest blogs at the Times (which have run on WordPress since their inception). Blogs have had a roller coaster ride at the Times. They ramped up a ton of them, and now are on…
Let’s finish with a couple of…
Let’s finish with a couple of publishing hot takes… Ben Thompson talks about how Grantland was a money pit for ESPN, but why it shouldn’t have been. Text is a gateway drug, and Bill Simmons is already proving it with how he’s monetizing his new podcast (that he started after ESPN fired him… the drama…
Popping the publisher bubble
Ben Thompson does excellent analysis. In his latest post he talks about the big problems facing journalism and publishing online. Here’s my favorite part: It is easy to feel sorry for publishers: before the Internet most were swimming in money, and for the first few years online it looked like online publications with lower costs…
The CMSs powering American news websites
It might surprise you that WordPress is not the most used CMS amongst traditional news outlets in the United States. Barrett Golding, of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, surveyed over 1,500 news outlets in the US, and attempted to identify their primary content management systems. WordPress came in second — by a wide margin– amongst daily…
It’s time to ditch download counts on WordPress.org and get real stats
I’m grumpy today. Clickbait journalism annoys me, and WordPress security related clickbait journalism especially annoys me. Ars Technica, PC World, ZD Net, and TripWire are just a few sites that reported over a million WordPress sites were susceptible to being hacked after a vulnerability was discovered by Sucuri. Except, you know, that it’s not true. The…
New journalism
Bloggers and journalists are experimenting with new models of monetization and independent publishing. One of the pioneers of subscription-based independent blog-based journalism just called it quits, but we should still laud his pioneering effort, not call blogging dead (again).
What to expect from PressNomics
PressNomics is this week. Here’s a preview of some of the things I’m looking forward to. I can’t wait to hang out with those of you going!
Post formats are slowly dying, and that’s okay
Post formats were introduced in WordPress 3.1. They were, and still are, little more than an organizational feature that allows themes to support ten custom content formats such as asides, links, quotes, video, and audio. They are just a taxonomy — similar to categories and tags — and are restricted to whatever the active theme…
Aesop, a Medium-esque “story engine” for WordPress
Aesop is a self-described “story engine” for WordPress. The plugin boasts “components designed for rich storytelling experiences.” Basically, it creates an admin interface that allows a site owner to create interactive stories, similar to those popularized by projects like Medium 1.0 and a number of big news agencies like The Washington Post and The New York…
Meet Joshua Benton, Director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab
Joshua Benton runs a small newsroom of four full time staff. They publish around fifteen items a week on Nieman Lab, their WordPress based website. Their newsroom is different than most newsrooms though, because they mostly publish about other newsrooms. The Nieman Journalism Lab was started by Josh in 2007, and today is a highly…
Welcome to the small leagues: On WordPress and journalism
A friend and former coworker of mine really likes the word “webmaster”. Because it’s a hilarious word. It suggests that this person has control over the web in general, which is pretty pretentious. However, traditional webmasters have long had a place in the workplace. Today, I stumbled upon a conversation between Marc Andreesson, of the…
End of content
End of content
