BY KINSEY WILSON · NOV. 18, 2022

The Better Government Association of Chicago and Signal Cleveland are separated by 100 years of history yet share remarkably similar missions.

Founded in 1923 to promote voter participation, BGA is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative force that teams with other Chicago newsrooms to shed light on government activities and hold public officials to account.

Signal is one of a growing number of digital-news startups combining traditional shoe-leather reporting with greater citizen participation in news gathering.

Both unveiled new websites in the past week on Newspack, an open-source publishing platform that in just three years has launched 200 independent publications to help publishers find a path to financial sustainability.

We’re proud of that accomplishment. But Newspack is part of a wider story of how local newsrooms are finding support from a growing network of organizations,   some for-profit, some not-for-profit. These groups spread the cost of technology, training and back-office services so that local news operations such as  BGA and Signal can focus on what they do best, namely reporting stories and connecting with readers and small businesses.

The model is familiar to anyone who has worked within larger newspaper chains or broadcast conglomerates, where technology, HR, legal, finance and other services were consolidated.

But unlike those commercial concerns, which often put corporate profit ahead of public service, the new crop of so-called “shared services” organizations are designed to promote independence and local control.

The logic is pretty straightforward. The technology required to operate any modern digital news site with best-of-breed advertising, audience development and reader-revenue systems, is not that different from what powers The New York Times or The Washington Post.

But small local sites lack the capacity to deploy systems of that sophistication. And even where they can tap into a larger system, the business expertise to operate them is often in short supply.

And local newsrooms have an equally urgent need to speed the development of digital journalism skills if they are to survive and thrive. That’s generally best done by organizations that can deliver technology, business operations and training at scale.

Richard Tofel, the former President of ProPublica and now a consultant, took issue with the growth of these “intermediaries,” as he termed them, in a pair of Substack posts last week. He questioned whether some of the philanthropic money flowing to these service organizations would be better directed to individual news organizations.

“[A] great deal of good work has been and will be done with such money by these and other fast-growing intermediaries,” Tofel wrote. “But I am convinced that more good might have been done by directing much of institutional foundations’ money instead to the most deserving news nonprofits…”

Read the full article on Newspack.pub

BY KINSEY WILSON · OCT. 14, 2021

Despite the pall that hangs over much of the news industry these days, there are real bright spots, even in smaller local markets where the effects of a now two-decade-long economic disruption have landed hard.

As Poynter’s Rick Edmonds noted back in May, the local news digital startup scene is surging and looks significantly more promising than it did just a few short years ago. From Santa Cruz, to Akron, to Vermont, to Memphis, there are beacons of hope everywhere on the horizon.

And yet, the question of how to build on these still nascent glimmers of success, fast enough to offset the continuing loss of thousands of reporting jobs in local communities, remains elusive.

It’s not for lack of trying. Over the past three years, Google, Facebook, The Knight Foundation and others have plowed more than a billion dollars into efforts to study, catalog, test and support local news initiatives with everything from training to direct financial subsidies.

It’s generated an immense body of work that, taken together, can provide an aspiring news entrepreneur with some of the basic building blocks of a sustainable model for local news.

But it can also feel overwhelming. And at the end of the day, no one has found a simple, repeatable formula. More often than not, success depends on the skills of the editor or publisher. Their vision, their business savvy, the talent they attract and perhaps most important, whether they grasp how to build a step at a time, without getting overextended or undershooting because they haven’t mastered every detail.

In more than 25 years of driving digital innovation across the news business, I’ve come to understand — often the hard way — that technology, timing and execution are far more important than the next new thing.

So what will it take to get the industry to a point where it can move with pace and confidence?

Two years ago, a small team I put together at Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, began building a publishing platform for small- and medium-sized local news organizations we called Newspack. (The project was jumpstarted with support from some of the aforementioned funders including Knight, The Lenfest Institute and the Google News Initiative, which has provided the lion’s share of the funding.)

The premise was simple: provide local news publishers with access to some of the same tools that larger organizations already enjoy at an affordable price so they don’t have to constantly struggle to figure out their own technology needs.

But the ambition was grander. With technology as a foundation, we hoped to incorporate the emerging business and editorial insight being developed across the industry to help local news organizations find a path to a more sustainable economic future.

Read the full article on Poynter.org

BY CHRISTINE SCHMIDT · JAN. 14, 2019

Around two-thirds of smaller and medium-sized publishers use WordPress as their CMS (that’s content management system for the newbies) — but how many publishers can say they’ve developed a sustainable business model?

The optimistic answer: More in 2019 (the realistic answer: unclear), or at least they’ll get closer to cobbling it together.

WordPress.com is launching a new toolkit, called Newspack, for small and mid-sized publishers to streamline their technical decisions — and make choices that add to the potential of finagling a business model. Kinsey Wilson, former digital guru at NPR and The New York Times and now WordPress.com’s president, is leading the initiative, working with the News Revenue Hub and Spirited Media as development partners…

“It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom,” Wilson said, “but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.”

Read the full story at NiemanLab.org

BY DAVID BEARD · FEBRUARY 15, 2018

When Kinsey Wilson was leading digital transformation at USA Today 15 years ago, WordPress was emerging from a single bit of code that helped pretty up typography for casual writing.

Since then, Wilson went on to spearhead digital change at NPR and at the New York Times, and WordPress became the world’s biggest self-hosted blogging tool, powering 29 percent of all sites on the web.

This morning, Automattic Inc., announced that Wilson would become president of its flagship commercial venture, the WordPress.com publishing platform. That effort integrates social and ad tools for some of the leading digital publishers.

Read the full interview

First published on NiemanLab as part of their 2018 predictions for journalism.

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“Either Facebook and Google are platforms, in which case they need to manage their infrastructure in a way that allows independent journalism to thrive. Or they are publishers, in which case they need to provide direct financial support for the journalism their platforms deliver.”

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BY KINSEY WILSON

With a hat-tip (or apologies) to Axios and Mike Allen, who have reinvented the email newsletter and made it a must-read…

1 Big Thing: The next big battle with the platforms

As more and more news organizations turn to paid subscriptions to offset dwindling digital ad revenue, the next big issue they’ll confront is who controls the customer: publishers or platforms. Specifically, who determines the pricing, bundling, and fulfillment of subscription payments in an aggregated news environment.

Why it matters: Depending on how it plays out, the platforms could lend added muscle to efforts to find a sustainable business model for digital news and information. Or they could rob editorial enterprises of one of the last remaining points of economic leverage, namely their trusted relationship with the reader.

To their credit, Google and Facebook are in the early stages of testing how they might support publishers’ subscription models.

So what’s the rub? Digital subscription and membership models have yet to prove themselves as an industry-wide solution. A handful of big publishers (and several smaller niche publishers) have seen real success. But most have so far struggled to generate meaningful revenue.

In a news-feed environment where readers encounter a mix of free and paywalled content, there is a real question whether they’ll be willing subscribe to a multitude of different publications. If they don’t, it’s almost inevitable that the platforms will urge publishers to blend and bundle multiple titles into a single coherent subscription package.

And publishers will find themselves with a Hobson’s choice: Try to drive standalone subscriptions in a crowded marketplace, where only a few thrive. Or give in to bundling and turn over to the platforms their relationship with the reader in return for fractional shares of the bundled price. Neither outcome is likely to be satisfying or sustainable.

Independent, fact-based news gathering is the foundation of an informed society. In disrupting the business model for news, Facebook and Google have done so without replacing the essential news gathering on which democracy depends. (Indeed, to their chagrin, the platforms have lately become purveyors of an alarming amount of misinformation.) In that environment, the question of their obligation to news publishers, to journalism, and to society looms large. The solution is fairly simple, if not easily achieved.

Be smart: Either Facebook and Google are platforms, in which case they need to manage their infrastructure in a way that allows independent journalism to thrive. Or they are publishers, in which case they need to provide direct financial support for the journalism their platforms deliver.

Simply put, that either means providing tools for publishers to manage their business on the platforms (via APIs and direct ownership of the customer). Or it means paying publishers for their content.

Google has taken an important first step in giving publishers control over how many stories can be viewed for free when readers click through from search.

But it is merely the first step in a larger conversation over control of the customer that will unfold in the year ahead.

Kinsey Wilson is a digital executive with The New York Times