Table of contents of the article:
An online newspaper it needs some precautions that many other sites of another type do not need to have. The main reason is that an online newspaper has a frequent publication of content even every few minutes between one news and another and therefore requires an efficient content management system such as a CMS based on WordPress.
WordPress is an open source "blog" and content management system (CMS) software platform or a program that, running on the server side, allows the creation and distribution of an Internet site made up of textual or multimedia content, easily manageable and dynamically updated . It was initially created by Matt Mullenweg and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is developed in PHP with support for the MySQL database manager.
WordPress powers nearly a third of the world's websites, from small personal blogs to complex sites from large corporations like Sony, Time Inc., New York Post and NBC. WordPress is just one of the site builders and content management systems that users can download and install for free, but it has unique features that make it the most popular content management system in use today.
If you use an Open Source CMS and very popular like WordPress which is absolutely perfect for the management of an online newspaper, it is necessary to deal with bureaucratic and technological aspects of no less importance so that an editorial project can succeed very well and not die from an incorrect configuration or technological limitations.
Essentially, the types of main problems can be divided into three types, bureaucratic, editorial, technological and marketing.
The following article will evaluate a hypothetical scenario in which it is intended to create an online newspaper with the entrepreneurial aim of deriving revenues and related profits. That is to have the possibility of being able to remunerate an editorial staff, and additional staff as well as obtain a monetary profit that we will call profit.
Problems and bureaucratic precautions.
In all honesty, it has never been our vocation to deal with the bureaucratic aspects of online newspapers, but after more than 10 years of consulting delegated to third-party law professionals we have now also learned the legal practice in order to advise which aspects not to underestimate for a management intelligent than an online news organization.
Enrollment in the court.
An online news organization should (not a requirement) be filed with the court for have sometimes important advantages such as contributions to publishing or public subsidies.
Thus art. 3-bis of the law of 16 July 2012, 103 (Simplifications for small web periodicals): "Periodical publications created solely on IT support and disseminated only electronically or online, whose publishers have not applied for public benefits, contributions or subsidies and which generate annual revenues from publishing activities not exceeding 100.000 euros, are not subject to obligations established by article 5 of the law of 8 February 1948, n. 47, from article 1 of law no. 5, and subsequent amendments, and by article 1981 of the law of 416 March 16, n. 7, [...] 2001. For the purposes of paragraph 62, annual revenues from publishing activities mean revenues deriving from subscriptions and sales in any form, including the offer of individual paid content, advertising and sponsorships, contracts and agreements with public and private entities».
Practically, the registration of online newspapers is solely and exclusively an administrative obligation imposed only on publishers who intend to access contributions to publishing (public funding provided for by law no. 7 of 03/2001/62).
To learn more about this legal and bureaucratic aspect, we invite you to read more about this law article: https://www.laleggepertutti.it/203226_testata-giornalistica-online-la-registrazione-e-obbligatoria
Appointment of a responsible director.
It is mandatory if you opt for the publication of the newspaper to the court to appoint a responsible director.
According to the press law (Law 47/1948) "each newspaper or other periodical must have a responsible editor". This figure has the task of running a newspaper and answering for everything that is published before the law. In the case of defamation in the press, for example, in addition to the journalist and the publisher, the director responsible is also called to answer for lack of control of the published contents. On the basis of what is illustrated by the National Journalistic Labor Agreement, the latter illustrates the agreements and the political-editorial program agreed with the publisher to the assembly of editors, proposes hiring and dismissals for technical-professional reasons, establishes the duties of journalists and gives directions for the editorial work.
A responsible director must necessarily meet some requirements which for the sake of brevity we summarize below:
- Be of Italian nationality or intra-community (Europe)
- Documents such as birth certificate of residence and documents confirming the possession of the requisites to be able to register on the political electoral lists.
- Registration in the Order of Journalists.
ROC subscription for the provider.
Il ROC is a specific list established in Italy (and only and exclusively in Italy) by Law 31 July 1997, n. 249, to which the recipients of concessions or authorizations regarding communication must be registered. In ROC, whose regulation is entrusted toAuthority for Guarantees in Communications, the infrastructure di diffusion operating in the territory national.
ISP - Internet Service Provider
Un internet service provider is a commercial structure or organization that offers Internet services to users (residential or business). The ISPs guarantee internet access for a fee (think ADSL, Fiber and similar connectivity providers), and they can ALSO create email account, web browser and space for the development of a website. One of the main services is the registration or transfer of names to DNS domain. When it comes to Internet access, ISPs form the nodes in the computer network that makes up the Internet.
HSP - Hosting Provider
Hosting (from English to host, to host), in computer science, means a network service that consists in allocating the web pages of a website or a web application on a web server, thus making it accessible from the Internet and to its users.
This "web server", defined "host", is connected to the Internet in a suitable way to guarantee access to the pages of the site through the web browser of the user's client host, with identification of the contents by domain and IP address. The service can be free or paid, typically of higher quality in the second case.
WordPress: Use of a suitable CMS for online publications.
Although in 2020 there are still some detractors of WordPress as the ideal content publishing system for an online newspaper, we can quickly change our mind by looking at some famous international examples of sites that use WordPress for online publications to convince you that WordPress is not just a possible solution but it is THE SOLUTION.
Fortune
One of the largest trade magazines out there uses WordPress to deliver everything from stock reports to economic investigative pieces.
New York Times
The New York Times, known for decades for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, is run on WordPress.
Reuters US
Specializing in international and political news, Reuters US trusts the WordPress CMS to support its editorial blog. Here the writers analyze current events.
TEAM
Time magazine is known for delivering long-form information pieces to newsstands around the world. WordPress powers the magazine's online presence.
Other popular publications using WordPress
Among the others that we have not honored with a screenshot on our site we can mention in no particular order:
Wired, TED, People, TechCrunch, VOGUE, Observer, The New York Post, Herald Sun, Glamor, Larry King Live, etc .., more than practical demonstration that WordPress is not a toy intended for amateur use, but adopted by leading companies of communication and information from all over the world.
Advantages of using WordPress as a CMS
Here are some of the key benefits of using WordPress to set up and run your business or personal site.
1. Flexible and adaptable for changing needs
Although WordPress was originally designed to support blogs and related online posting types, it also powers a wide variety of sites with other purposes. WordPress is used to manage complex sites for large multinationals, manage small businesses and create personal blogs. WordPress sites can contain full-service eCommerce stores, showcase a portfolio, or host a social network, group, or podcast. Whatever the requirements of a business, the core WordPress package plus a variety of basic and premium plugins to suit your site. Thanks to its many themes and easy access to its source files, WordPress is also infinitely adaptable to a company's changing needs.
2. Easy to use: even for beginners
A WordPress site can be set up and installed in minutes, even without any technical skills. All a user needs is a domain name and a web hosting account. WordPress can be installed for free via the WordPress hosting provider or uploaded directly from WordPress.org. From there, an intuitive and easy-to-manage admin dashboard has all the features you need to customize a site's header and layout and start creating pages and posts right away.
3. Themes offer more options
WordPress themes offer users a wide range of choices for perfecting the look and function of a new site, thanks to its large and growing basic and premium directory of themes. Many of these are immediately available to a new site owner through the WordPress theme directory, and thousands more can be purchased through third-party design markets and designers around the world. Themes can be previewed live and installed at any time to change the look and layout of a WordPress site.
4. Plugins extend functionality
WordPress includes all the elements needed to build a basic site, but many users want more specialized features related to a site's specific needs. The WordPress plugin directory includes hundreds of plugins, small snippets of code designed to perform specific tasks, which allow users to add features like shopping carts, galleries, contact forms, and more to any compatible WordPress site. Users can also purchase and install hundreds of custom plugins from third-party developers. Plugins can be enabled or disabled and uninstalled as needed as a site evolves.
5. WordPress sites are high on the charts and well positioned
Search is the key to ranking high on Google and other search engines. WordPress sites tend to rank first for their keywords, mainly because they are constantly being updated and because WordPress includes a variety of SEO (search engine optimization) content optimization tools and plugins.
6. WordPress sites are mobile sensitive
Mobile responsiveness is also a factor in Google's rankings, so websites need to look good on any device. WordPress offers a variety of responsive theme designs, and users can also make a static site responsive with plugins and theme file changes.
7. WordPress sites have a built-in blog
Since WordPress is content management system software, it has multiple features that make content publishing easier. One of them is a “built-in” blog feature that can be accessed from any device, at any time, so users who want to add a blog to their website don't have to create one separately. This also makes it possible for non-blogging sites to use the blog feature to add updates or announcements.
8. The WordPress community offers support
Since WordPress is free and open source, it is supported by communities who love WordPress around the world. This community of WordPress enthusiasts is responsible for making changes to the source files and keeping WordPress up-to-date and secure. The WordPress community also engages in a wide range of user outreach activities, hosting WordPress camps around the world and supporting the growth of local WordPress user groups.
WordPress is used by over 30 percent of CMS-based websites around the world, and it's easy to see why. WordPress makes the essential tools for creating a wordpress website available to any user, not just experienced web developers, and such tools can support even a small personal site and a large and complicated business web portal. With a host of features like themes and plugins designed to extend its functions, WordPress works for all types of sites.
List of main features of WordPress:
- Extension of functionality through plugins[1];
- Availability of thousands of free themes[2], and others for a fee, to customize the look of the blog;
- Management of pages with templates;
- Permanent URLs that help search engine optimization;
- Category management;
- Trackback and Pingback functions;
- WYSIWYG editor for text formatting;
- Creating static pages;
- Multi-author support;
- Multi-site support (can be activated from version 3.0, or using the WordPress MU variant);
- Log of users who visit the blog;
- Blocking of users based on IP address;
- Ability to specify meta tags;
- From version 3.7 there is an automatic update system.
Develop the WordPress site
Although our company does not directly offer web development services, much less WordPress, we have the ability to put you in contact with our collaborators for the development of a highly usable and performing WordPress site.
Although the solution to develop a theme tailored to your newspaper entirely from scratch, the most popular choice is to use ready-made themes to customize perhaps using Themeforest a site that offers professional themes and plugins developed by the best agencies and freelancers in the world.
Here are some of the examples (just a handful out of hundreds available) of the hottest topics in the news / magazine sector ideal for creating a newspaper on WordPress:
After careful customization with your colors, logos and various wordings, the site will be absolutely suitable for your needs. Adding features via Plugins will allow you to add features such as Members Area, Newsletters, Image and Video Galleries and much much more.
A performing and optimized WordPress hosting
We have been specializing in high performance WordPress hosting for over 10 years, optimized for sites such as traffic spikes and hundreds of millions of visitors per month.
We have already talked about it in some case studies in this article e this.
The software configuration we use is considered flagship, and used by the few high-performance WordPress hosting companies worldwide.
More precisely, the choice and adoption of these server-side software (better defined as a software stack) allows us to achieve the objectives defined in this document which for the sake of brevity we could summarize in speed, lower page weight, lower latency, the ability to withstand a over 100 thousand online users per minute.
Varnish SuperCache will work in HTTPS compatible mode and to http / 2 thus being able to have the best performance on the caching side on the market by improving multiplexing, speed and content download.
It will also be SEO Friendly, that is, able to be fully compliant with the best practices relating to the updates of sitemaps, AMP pages, Instact articles and rss feeds.
The Webp compression is performed in a fully automated way by the mod_PageSpeed module will allow us to serve webp images to the browsers that support them, allowing data savings of the order of 50%.
The software stack proposed, installed and expertly configured is the same that can be found installed on online publications such as CNN, NyTimes, Buzzfeed, CBS.com and many more.
