Why WordPress?
Here at The Seattle Times, we’re preparing to replace our decade-old digital CMS with WordPress. Can a free blogging tool power a complex, high-traffic newspaper website? We think so, and we’re not alone.
Newspapers have long used WordPress to power blogs (as if blog posts were somehow wholly different from articles), but a growing number of “old media” sites have moved their primary digital publishing activity over to WordPress, so we’re in increasingly good company. A few such sites with WordPress at their core:
- Metro UK, perhaps the largest newspaper site powered entirely by WordPress
- Bangor Daily News, one of the earliest newspaper WordPress converts
- New York Observer
- Germany’s Die Tageszeitung
- Canada’s National Post and Global News
- Tribune Broadcasting Sites
And of course, a much larger number of digital-only news sites — including many that get way more traffic than we do — use WordPress. So it’s not a question of scale, I think, but more a question of culture.
In our quest for culture change here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the inspiration we took from Journal Register Company’s 2010 Ben Franklin Project — a bid to publish in print and online using only free tools — and Bangor’s pioneering and well–documented switch to WordPress.
Want to help us realize our own open-source digital news future? Check out our job openings in technology, design and product management.