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.

But, as I say, who am I to judge. And, to be fair, the Express & Star has now dipped a toe into Facebook and Twitter.

Still, it’s interesting to contrast the Express & Star with another site where Wordpress and a daily newspaper took their marriage vows in the church of Web 2.0.

I’ve enjoyed Steve Buttry’s insightful blogs for some time and happened to speak to this passionately social-media-minded editorial chief at The Gazette, in Iowa, the week his new Wordpress-based website was launched.

The Gazette is a seven-day title with a long tradition. But Steve Buttry is hardly what you’d call traditional. For starters, after moving from the editor’s chair into a company development position, he now signs his emails ‘C3 Coach’.

C3? The Complete Community Connection – Steve’s vision and philosophy for the future of newspapers, local media and journalism.

Steve has received a lot of well-deserved applause for his C3 blueprint, which he shares in detail on a separate Wordpress.com blog. It’s a powerful, wide-ranging treatise that proclaims as one of it’s cornerstones: “Don’t assume anything based on the past. We are proud of our past and cherish our heritage, but we want to honor that heritage by pursuing a future that isn’t limited by assumptions from the past.”

Steve practices what he preaches. You’ll find him adding value to the conversation on Twitter and LinkedIn and making a positive difference in Iowa by leading social media courses for the local business community. His posts on social media, multimedia journalism and liveblogging are bang on target. And watch out for his swinging sledgehammer in the debate over online news paywalls.

So it will come as no surprise to find Steve taking a different approach at gazetteonline.com

The site development was led in-house by visual editor Jason Kristufek (a journalist) and took just three months. The cost was measured in Jason’s time rather than consultancy dollars. And the result is a site, with conversation and flexibility at its core, that can – and will – adapt constantly over the coming months. It’s a big, brave, juicy blog.

When I spoke to an equally-enthusiastic Jason, he had a whole list of new ideas he’s eager to introduce, many of them around the theme of collaboration. This is unashamedly work in progress. Community R&D. A learning curve. And that’s exactly what news sites must be.

Certainly there are challenges in adapting the Wordpress CMS for use in a multi-user, multi channel newsroom. But in these cash-strapped, community-engaged times, the benefits are obvious.

And if the alternative is development-by-corporate-committee, rigid functionality that’s out of date as soon as it’s introduced and a user interface that ignores a converged workflow, I’m sure more titles will be taking the plunge.

Any more examples out there …?

• After this story was posted, Steve contacted me to make sure credit was given where it’s really due. He said: “It’s an overstatement to say that I’m ‘taking a different approach at gazetteonline’. While I support and applaud Jason’s approach, gazetteonline is his baby and all credit for the redesign should go to him, Product Manager Sarah Gorsh and their colleagues.”

Sorry if I didn’t give Jason, Sarah and the team the applause they most certainly deserve.

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