NEVADA CITY, Calif. November 7, 2019 – Newspack has chosen a group of 34 news organizations to guide the next phase of development of a new WordPress-based platform for small and medium-sized publishers – and YubaNet is one of them. We’re excited to share the news with you and to be part of this next step in digital publishing.
“We’re delighted by the interest that’s been shown in Newspack and the fact that barely six months into the project we have 45 participating news organizations,” said Kinsey Wilson, president of WordPress.com in a news release. “It demonstrates the appetite for affordable solutions that will help sustain journalism at the local level.”
“Our job is to deliver news to our readers, on whichever device they use. At the same time, our business needs to be sustainable to continue fulfilling our mission. We look forward to a flexible, robust publishing platform designed to deliver a great user experience and allow us to focus on content production,” states Pascale Fusshoeller, YubaNet’s editor and resident geek. “Over the past 20 years YubaNet has kept the community informed, especially during emergencies, with increasingly better infrastructure to handle traffic spikes. This will be a game changer as far as content production goes.”
Newspack is supported by funding, as well as technical and advisory assistance, from the Google News Initiative; The Lenfest Institute for Journalism; ConsenSys, the venture studio backing Civil Media; and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Newspack is being developed by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, whose CEO, Matt Mullenweg, is the cofounder of the WordPress open-source software. Newspack sites will be hosted, secured, and updated by WordPress.com, allowing them to tap into the world-class technology and support relied upon by some of the most trusted names in journalism.
About Automattic
Automattic wants to make the web a better place. We’re the company behind products including WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Jetpack, and enterprise WP VIP, and we’re a fully distributed company, with more than 1,150 employees in 72 countries speaking 91 different languages. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL.
About WordPress.com
WordPress.com helps millions of people create websites for small business, publishing, and blogging. We host sites for some of the biggest brands and publishers in the world — including Microsoft, News Corp. and CNN — and our users publish more than 87 million new posts every month.