CEO Merrill Brown says he founded The News Project to address one of the big problems in the journalism business: “It costs too much to launch and operate news sites.”It’s an issue that Brown knows well — he’s a former journalist, journalism executive and educator who served as the founding editor in chief of MSNBC.com. He announced earlier this year that The News Project has raised a six-figure investment from WordPress VIP, and now it’s actually launching with its first customer, the nonprofit site CALmatters, which offers news and analysis around California politics.
Last week, Brown and The News Project’s product lead Miguel Ferrer walked me through what the company does, both for CALmatters and more generally. The company’s pitch, in a nutshell, is to provide a “news business in a box.”
Ferrer explained, “Not only is it what you need for a news business in a box, it’s also understood to be more than a technical toolset, more than a CMS, even as the CMS is ultimately the core of everything.”
Put another way: The News Project has stitched together a publishing platform by working with a number of different partners, offering content management and hosting from WordPress VIP, website development by 10up, reader engagement tools from Piano, design by Charming Robot and ads by Google Ad Manager. (TechCrunch works with a number of these companies, including WordPress VIP, 10up and Piano.)
Attribution:Anthony Ha, techcrunch.com
Full Story: The News Project
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