WordPress Is Launching ‘Newspack’, A New Open Source News Platform Having Blockchain Features

WordPress.com confirmed securing $2.4 million funding from industry heavyweights to develop and open-source publishing platform for digital media and news organizations.

The new product named ‘Newspack’ aims to create economically sustainable models for journalism while addressing the current obstacles. Currently, many news startups struggle through the complexities of development, technology section, hosting, maintenance and security. These hurdles pinch the revenue stream for these startups. The lack of proper tools and cost-effective solutions result into more losses.

Newspack aims to solve these issues. Besides giving a quick access to small publishers to the platform, it also provides affordable and robust system to integrate the best editorial practices from across the industry. By the mid-2019, Newspack partners will launch several news websites with a target of 60 by 2020.

WordPress has received funding from giants like Google, through it Google News initiative who has committed nearly $1.2 million. ConsenSys, the world’s largest blockchain company is also backing the project by investing $350,000 in this project. Other backers of the project include the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The official press release notes that Newspack will have blockchain-based features made available via ConsenSys-backed Civil Media. Civil’s publisher product will be installed as a plugin on the WordPress platform.

“The new publishing platform will include a native plugin for Civil, a ConsenSys formation. This will allow any interested newsroom using the platform to easily join Civil's community-owned and operated journalism network and/or permanently archive content in decentralized, tamper-proof storage environments,” notes the press release.

Kinsey Wilson, President of WordPress.com and a former senior executive at NPR, said: "Local news organizations are struggling to find sustainable models for journalism -- a crisis that has very real implications for democracy. We're joining with industry leaders to bring technology, publishing and business expertise together in a single platform that can be shared by news organizations across the globe.”

Today, more than 60 million websites hosted on the internet are using WordPress’ online content management system (CMS). In the past WordPress has also supported some crypto-related initiatives.

In 2012, WordPress added Bitcoin as payment option to its CMS upgrade. At that time, the company said that “unlike credit cards and PayPal, Bitcoin has no central authority and no way to lock entire countries out of the network.”

However, citing low priority in 2015, it also shut down the Bitcoin payment facility. Still, the company largely continues to remain pro-crypto.