Press This: WordPress and the Future of Journalism

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording. Powered by RedCircle Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine and my contributions on torquemag.io. You can subscribe to Press This on RedCircle , iTunes , Spotify , or your favorite podcasting app. You can also download episodes directly from WMR.fm. Now, the media landscape has always had its ups and downs, but the past few months have felt particularly grim to me for journalism. Prominent newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have had massive layoffs in January. And since then other sites like Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Pitchfork, and Vice-that’s a big one-have had their newsrooms gutted, turning them effectively into ghost brands. These companies will still exist as a brand, but just without the journalists. In the wake of all this, we’ve seen a few successful worker-owned sites like Defector , Flaming Hydra , and 404 Media popping up and doing great journalism. We’ve also seen the rise of independently owned newsletters powered by platforms like Substack , Patreon , Ghost , and yes, WordPress. I wanted to learn more about the future of publishing so today I’m talking with Ryan Singel, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative , which helps subscriber-driven newsletters and sites thrive with independent tools rather than using the VC funded platforms of the olden times. Now, Ryan is, like I said, the Co-Founder of Outpost Publishers Cooperative. He’s also the founder of Contextly , which is one of my favorite WordPress plugins and a former editor at Wired Magazine , Ryan, how are you doing today? Ryan Singel: Great! Thanks for having me on, Doc! Doc Pop: Yeah. Yeah. With that big bummer intro hopefully you’re gonna brighten things up today. I know that you came from the world of journalism. Why don’t you give us a little bit of your just a brief rundown of your WordPress origin story. Ryan Singel: Yeah so I had had my own kind of blog sites. I think the first one I had was on MovableType, and then when I was working at Wired, which was part of a, you know, owned by Condé Nast, a big publishing, you know, conglomerate, we were stuck on sort of terrible magazine-centric CMS that we all hated, and we kind of had an internal revolt and managed to sort of get Wired to be allowed to run WordPress and it was a liberating experience for us. So I think that was, maybe that was fairly early on. I wanna say like 2007-ish maybe I wanna say. And so just, it freed things up, launched a bunch of just sort...

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