WordPress for newsrooms

I’m answering your questions about the future of news technology, and about how news works behind the scenes. If you have a question for me, enter it here, and I’ll answer it in a future post.

Steve asks:

What do you think of news organizations that use WordPress, and where do you suggest they move in terms of a CMS?

There are two CMS choices that I think are particularly well-suited for newsrooms. The first, Ghost, is perfect for smaller newsrooms with a newsletter-centric distribution model. (I love Ghost’s elegance and use it for my own site and newsletter.) The other is, indeed, WordPress.

In my experience, other content management systems are at least one of the following:

• Proprietary, locking you into a vendor’s ecosystem without an easy exit
• Flexible but unopinionated, providing copious building blocks that you could potentially build a site with but not enough out-of-the-box support for editorial workflows
• Overly technical, requiring that users edit stories in static text files and commit them using git – a non-starter in any newsroom environment
• Marketing and sales oriented, rather than editorially focused

In practice, these are the two systems that excel at sites that center on ongoing content publishing.

When to choose Ghost over WordPress

A newsroom should choose Ghost if memberships are central to its strategy and simplicity is an asset. Conversely, it should choose WordPress if it needs complex integrations or customizations, multiple content types, or plans to distribute to multiple off-site platforms.

Ghost’s managed Pro offering requires significantly less ongoing technical involvement than WordPress, making it more suitable for newsrooms without dedicated development resources. However, most CMS platforms, including Ghost, benefit from some technical support for customizations and integrations. The biggest difference is architectural: you can best think of Ghost as an out-of-the-box CMS and WordPress as a framework for building more complex websites with CMS functionality at their core.

As such, Ghost may not be suitable for newsrooms that need complex integrations or other interactive customization. Self-hosting is also arguably technically harder than with WordPress. But it’s pretty great. It powers newsrooms like The Kyiv Independent, 404 Media, and Hellgate NYC. On the other hand, if you need an extensive plugin ecosystem, WordPress is likely a better fit.

WordPress for publishers

Although it started as a blogging platform, WordPress has come on in leaps and bounds for professional use cases. (Ironically, it is now less good at this original mission, for which Ghost is a much better choice.) Particularly when you consider its plugin ecosystem, it includes most of the features even very large newsrooms need to publish on the web as well as to off-site platforms like Apple News.

WordPress’s open-source nature means that while recent leadership controversies at Automattic have created some uncertainty, the platform itself remains stable and newsrooms have multiple hosting options that provide independence from any single company's decisions.

It’s an open platform, under active development, with a thriving ecosystem that allows newsrooms to choose functionality that meets their individual needs while embracing the open web. Because it’s open source, newsrooms can easily move providers and can modify its functionality to their hearts content.

But it’s also not one thing.

Multiple WordPresses to choose from

The platform comes in lots of flavors. Newsrooms need to pick between the following:

Self-hosted WordPress: Take the WordPress core platform and plugins and host them wherever you like, managing the files and your deployment process. The upside here is complete control; the downside is that you’re on the hook for both platform and infrastructure maintenance, and you need to have the team to support both.

Costs: The costs and complexity of self-hosting start small, but they grow quickly, particularly when you consider security monitoring and development overheads. WordPress doesn’t have a stellar security reputation, and it’s because of these installations: often people will take the open source platform and run it on their own infrastructure without having the time, resources, or skills to keep it safe and up to date. Those issues stem from outdated installations and vulnerable plugins; a degree of awareness is required to keep an installation locked down and current.

Managed WordPress hosting: Platforms like Pressable provide a fully-managed WordPress hosting environment. They keep the core codebase up to date, maintain the infrastructure for you, give you a CDN, and help with tasks like migrations. You’re then left to maintain your theme and any plugins.

Costs: Usually newsrooms will find themselves paying up to around $500 a month.

Newspack: A managed WordPress hosting solution tuned for small and medium sized newsrooms that can’t dedicate more than one or two people to building their websites. It comes with a set of plugins and integrations that provide things like CRM, newsletter, and advertising support so that you don’t have to build those from scratch or assemble them yourself. This provides the same kind of integrated, turnkey solution that Ghost offers.

Costs: Hosted Newspack starts at $750 a month and smartly tiers itself based on how much the newsroom is making: as of September 7, 2025, prices seem to be roughly pegged at 0.25% of gross revenue. To put this in perspective, a newsroom with $1M annual revenue would pay roughly $2,500/month – competitive with enterprise solutions but potentially costly for smaller operations as they scale.

WordPress VIP: Enterprise-grade WordPress hosting with white-glove support, designed for larger newsrooms that need to scale to large audiences (the service hosts Vox Media, NBCUniversal, and TIME, for example; the latter received 100,000 requests a second for some of its Taylor Swift coverage). The support and infrastructure are top-tier (I’ve moved two websites to VIP so far and was impressed both times). But the trade-off is that your code needs to be run through VIP’s own CI/CD tests — as well as the cost, which is not unreasonable for an enterprise-level service but may be too high for many newsrooms.

Costs: There’s no off-the-shelf published pricing, but it’s fair to say that WordPress VIP is not a budget option.

How to choose a WordPress solution

The right solution depends on:

• The number of full-time technical employees on your team
• Your budget
• Your size

Because of the time involved in maintenance and infrastructure, I think self-hosted WordPress is only really feasible for newsrooms with larger technical teams. For those teams, who may also be building more customizations, the extra control might be worth it. Everyone else needs to apportion their time and resources very carefully.

Most newsrooms need to spend their time and resources on the things that make their offerings unique, rather than working on commodities like infrastructure or core WordPress maintenance. That makes using managed services a no-brainer: those things are fully taken care of, usually better than a small team could manage themselves.

If you need an out-of-the-box newsroom platform and want access to the WordPress ecosystem: Choose Newspack.

If you don’t want or have outgrown the curated set of plugins Newspack provides and you have more development firepower: Choose a managed WordPress hosting solution like Pressable.

If you have enterprise traffic or security concerns, need white glove support, and have the budget to back it up: Choose WordPress VIP.

Whichever tier you pick within the WordPress ecosystem, I think it’s a solid choice. WordPress continues to have strong community support and an excellent ecosystem. The key is matching the solution's complexity to your team's resources; it’s better to choose a more managed solution that your team can execute well than a more flexible option that overwhelms your capacity.

Do you have a question about newsroom technology? Ask it here and I may answer it in a future post.