WordPress Partnering with Google to Develop a News Publishing Hub ‘Newspack’

Automattic, the developer of the world's one of the most popular Content Management System, WordPress.com, has announced a new project, Newspack. According to the founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, this is going to bring about a revolutionary change for the news publishers.

And guess what, WordPress.com is now partnering with Google accompanied by the other news industry leaders to raise the fund to develop this new news publising platform. So far, the team has secured $2.4 million in first-year funding from the Google News Initiative, Lenfest Journalism Institute, Civil funder ConsenSys, and the Knight Foundation, among others.

Newspack in a Few Words

It is a news publishing, all in one, open source Content Management Solution aimed at the small and midsized news organizations for publishing and monetizing their contents.

To tell you about the standard of the CMS, the founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg says,

As you have come to expect from Automattic, everything will be open source and developed to the same standards WordPress itself is. 

WordPress.com has already confirmed that this platform will contain the same standard as WordPress when it comes to quality.

So, Who Will Be Benefited with NewsPack?

With this project, the small and mid-sized news publishers will be benefited more than the large news publishers.

Despite doing all the stuff to manage your contents smartly, WordPress does not natively help the publishers to monetize their content using subscriptions, metered paywalls, and user accounts.

This is the reason, why Automattic is specifically designing this solution for the native and smaller news media companies so that they can easily get these things done with a minimalistic effort and investment.

How Will It Benefit Its Associated Community?

The smaller news startups often struggle with a number of obstacles like the right technology selection, development of the news platform, maintenance, security and last but not the least money making.

Unfortunately, there is no better platform in the class and above all an open source and cost-effective tool to tackle these complexities.

And this is exactly where this Newspack project by the WordPress.com comes to address these issues. Its goal is to incorporate all the best possible editorial and business practices from across the industry for the small and mid-sized news publishers. By mid-2019, the partners will also launch up to a dozen news sites that would piggyback up to 60 sites by the early 2020.

Kinsey from the Nieman Lab says,

It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom, but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.

To work with Automattic on this new platform, media organizations can apply now. The good news is that as a publisher you can avail the service free of cost during the development phase. And after that, you will have to pay $1000 to $2000 per month.

How the Project Is Financed?

For this huge project, the trio, Automattic, Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub already raised $2.4 million. Through the Google News Initiative, Google itself is funding $1.2 million. Other contributors include The Lenfest Institute for Journalism which is funding $400,000; ConsenSys, a blockchain software technology company which is contributing $350,000 and finally The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an American non-profit foundation which has funded $250,000 for the project.

However, that's not the end! From a fifth source an additional contribution of $200,000 is expected to be funded later this month toward the project.

Final Words

Definitely, it's an amazing initiative from the maker of WordPress, Automattic and it goes without saying that this project is a bit inspired by the Medium's move to monetizing online content.

Finally, we can conclude that the dominant news publishers won't necessarily move to Newspack. But it's a foregone conclusion that the small and mid-sized websites who are covering a particular or small area can be notably benefited from this project.