The Knight Foundation is awarding a total of $2 Million (USD) to 24 newsrooms to upgrade their websites. Almost every winner chose WordPress.
As Steve Burge of PublishPress notes, 20 out of 24 recipients of these grants will be moving to WordPress or upgrading their WordPress platform. Automattic’s Newspack platform is involved with some of these projects.
We reached out to Steve for further comment, and he said:
It’s clear that newspapers are in crisis in America. Yes, they are squeezed by falling ad revenue, but there are other significant problems. Many papers have fallen into the hands of hedge funds that are bleeding them dry. The good news is that a lot of innovative people are successfully launching news start-ups, and almost all of them are doing it with WordPress.
Steve shared an article from the Los Angeles Times highlighting three small, locally-focused newsrooms that are doing great work with WordPress, although their platform isn’t named in the article: Mississippi Today, The Oaklandside, and Votebeat. 🗞️
