Parliament Now is the digital political-news property published out of the Hill Times newsroom in Ottawa — a sister to the paper’s paid flagship, covering Parliament, the public service, federal politics, and the daily rhythm of the Ottawa news cycle for an audience the paid Hill Times does not directly serve. This engagement put Parliament Now onto WordPress® as part of the broader publisher project that also moved the Hill Times itself off Drupal.
The shared engagement
The Parliament Now build sat alongside the larger Hill Times piece of the engagement, done together with the publisher’s internal team. The Hill Times piece was the bigger lift — a Drupal-to-WordPress migration with full URL preservation and a paid-subscriber migration from the old Drupal membership system to Stripe, both of which I have written about in the Hill Times portfolio entry. The Parliament Now piece sat under the same publisher umbrella, on the same WordPress infrastructure, with a different audience and a different value contract.
What a free property gets from a paid property’s discipline
The interesting thing about building a free political-news property next to a paid one is how much of the paid property’s editorial discipline transfers across. The Hill Times’ readers pay for substance, for sourcing, and for the angle that beat reporting in Ottawa can find that the wires cannot. Parliament Now does not charge, but it inherits the same standard of substance from the same editorial team. The technical job on the build side was to give that editorial team a publishing surface that did not water that standard down: clean templates, fast publishing, sane archive structure, and a foundation the publisher could grow into without re-platforming again in three years.
Where this sits now
Both properties continued to evolve after this engagement under the Hill Times’ internal team, who own them now and have shipped redesigns and feature improvements in the years since. WordPress as the underlying platform turned out to be the right call for both. The publisher kept editorial control of the stack instead of being held to a vendor-managed system, and the same internal team that ships the Hill Times can ship Parliament Now without learning two different content management systems for the two properties.
- Platform: WordPress, custom theme
- The build: Free digital political-news property on the same WordPress foundation as the Hill Times’ Drupal-to-WordPress migration
- Client: The Hill Times publisher — Parliament Now
- Team: Done together with the Hill Times’ internal team
- Period: 2011
- Sister property: The Hill Times — the paid flagship paper that anchored the publisher engagement
Where this pattern transfers
Any publisher running a paid flagship and a free digital sister property has a version of this job: a national newspaper with a free digital tier, a trade publication with a free analyst-news side alongside paid research, or an academic publisher with a free news portal and a paid journal subscription. The temptation in all of them is to put the free property on a cheaper, lighter stack because it does not generate direct revenue, and the cost of that decision is editorial dilution on the free property and a stack-switching tax on the team that has to ship to both. The Hill Times publisher chose to run both properties on the same WordPress foundation, which gave the free property the same editorial discipline as the paid one and kept the team’s day-to-day cognitive load on one platform instead of two.
