In an interview published by The Verge, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg spoke about Automattic’s local-news project, Newspack. His remarks came in response to a question about why local journalism is also dying in the United States, framed within his view that websites are “dying” in favour of big tech’s closed platforms.
Audiences are becoming ever more demanding, and “in some cases we see single-person newsletters thriving just as well as large media organisations”, Mullenweg said, while many outlets are “struggling”. “That’s why I wanted to talk about local media, because it’s a great example: historically we had thousands of local newspapers in the United States, effectively geographic monopolies, and many of them have vanished. But I want to return to the Automattic ecosystem,” he continued.
Kinsey Wilson, former chief digital officer at The New York Times, is leading the Newspack initiative, bringing everything he learned there to smaller newspapers. Newspack can be understood as a distribution solution for WordPress: WordPress plus hosting, plus a plug-in bundle providing such small-town papers with everything they need, from classified ads to porous paywalls. “People still want local news; they just couldn’t survive on some of the old business models,” Mullenweg noted.
“The sad thing is that some publications that switch to Newspack end up saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Traditional software firms had been charging far too much for their services. Newspack still covers printing, so the paper can be dropped off at the neighbourhood café, but Mullenweg is more excited about new revenue streams now posible -such as paid newsletters or ultra-local sports results- which can fund three, five or even ten reporters to cover a small area, something he believes is essential for democracy.
Newspack starts at just US $750 a month and aims to remove the technical burden while enabling local papers to monetise.
Asked about the wider state of the Internet and the recent “WP drama” with WP Engine, Mullenweg said the lawyers seem to have won, admitting he now regrets some things he has said and done.
He also revealed that the much-publicised plan to migrate Tumblr to WordPress has been shelved for now, a casualty of Automattic’s workforce reduction that began with the WP drama and has seen the company lay off many employees, as other tech firms have done recently.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with chatGPT and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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