Newspapers and WordPress: A match made in heaven?

I learned a long time ago to respect the Wolverhampton Express & Star.

At the Birmingham Evening Mail, we heaped derision on our Black Country rival’s archaic design, while slugging it out in mortal combat for the title of Britain’s biggest-selling evening title.

At the time both sold (depending on your definition of ‘sold’) around 200,000 copies a night. By the end of last year, the privately-owned Express & Star series was selling around 130,000 a night. The Mail, after years of keeping shareholders happy, half that figure.

So I bit my tongue (again) when I saw the expressandstar.com website redesign some months back.

It’s built on WordPress – and there’s no greater fan of this open-source blogging platform than me. What still baffles me is how they came up with a site that manages to sidestep WordPress’s brilliant aptitude for conversation and crisp layout and instead project the paper’s traditional news-out-of-the-end-of-a-shotgun approach. (more…)