This talk was about running a newsroom on WordPress — the editorial roles, the workflow, the publishing rhythm, and the technical choices that keep a multi-author news site honest. I delivered it in August 2012 to a mixed audience of working journalists, news editors, and independent web developers thinking about the newspaper space.
What was happening in WordPress that year
2012 sat in the WordPress 3.4 to 3.5 cycle. Custom post types were a year past being stable. Most news sites running WordPress were still using categories instead of custom post types for sections, because the editorial habits had not caught up to the new architecture yet. Edit Flow was the editorial-workflow plugin most newsrooms reached for, and it was already starting to feel under-built for what newsrooms actually needed.
What still holds
The editorial roles have not changed. A writer, a sub-editor, a copy-editor, a section editor, an editor-in-chief — these still map cleanly to WordPress capabilities, and the workflow between them is still the load-bearing piece. The talk’s argument that WordPress works for newsrooms when the editorial workflow is taken seriously is still my answer to anyone asking the same question in 2026.
What is different now
The technical floor has moved. Block-based editorial is the standard. Custom roles via capability arrays are well understood. The newsroom custom-post-type pattern is more common than the category-as-section pattern. Headless WordPress is a real option for newsrooms with developer capacity, where it was not in 2012.
The current shape of this work is the newsroom thread of what I do today.
Slide deck from a WordPress newsroom talk, August 2012, archived for reference.
