Case Studies > Newspack
Newspack Clients Soaring Revenues Powered by WP Cloud Performance
Local news publishers operate on razor-thin margins where every dollar counts and technical problems directly impact revenue. Newspack moved 330+ newsrooms to WP Cloud, eliminating downtime and infrastructure costs so publishers could focus resources on journalism instead of server management.
Background
Small organizations often face an impossible choice: invest limited resources in technical infrastructure, or in their core mission. Local newsrooms are a perfect example; more than 3,500 newspapers have closed since 2005 leaving roughly 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news coverage. The publishers who remain face small staffs, shrinking budgets, and ever-growing technical demands.
Organizations like the Knight Foundation, Google News Initiative, and the Lenfest Institute were trying to help. They provided grants to support local journalism and digital innovation. But they kept running into the same problem: every newsroom had a different tech stack. What worked for one publisher couldn’t easily transfer to another. Grant money was going to custom development and technical maintenance instead.
Newspack launched in 2019 to solve that problem. The idea was simple: build one solid publishing platform, get newsrooms onto it, and the tools and expertise that work for one organization can benefit hundreds of others.
The platform is what Claudiu Lodromanean, who leads engineering at Newspack, calls “a news site in a box.” News publishers get everything they need to run a modern news site: content management built on WordPress, revenue tools for subscriptions and advertising, newsletter systems, and about 50 plugins designed specifically for news publishing. More importantly, they get a technical partner who handles all the infrastructure work.
“We are the publisher’s technical partner. We manage their site, we keep it online.”
– Claudiu Lodromanean, Newspack
Newspack’s partnership model scaled quickly. The platform originally launched with about a dozen charter organizations, but today serves over 330 news organizations. Newspack adds roughly half a dozen publishers each month, with another 100 in the pipeline.
The publishers range from the New York Amsterdam News, which bills itself as “New York City’s oldest Black newspaper,” to The Texas Tribune, regarded as one of the most successful digital news outlets in the nation. Most of Newspack’s partners have one thing in common: little or no technical staff and limited budgets, especially when compared to the ever-consolidating media giants.
The goal: give small newsrooms access to the kind of technical infrastructure that only organizations like The New York Times could previously afford.
The challenge
Building a platform is one thing. Keeping 330 news sites online – reliably – is another.
Keeping them online gets even harder with unpredictable bursts of traffic. For the most part, e-commerce site owners can plan for busy fourth quarters or Black Fridays. But traffic patterns for news sites don’t follow normal, predictable curves. A local election, a breaking story, or a viral post can send traffic from normal to 10x or even 30x in minutes.
The Newspack team learned this during the 2020 US national election when Bangor Daily News became the first outlet to call the results. Traffic spiked 10x instantly.
“With elections, they’re so infrequent, and each one is kind of different,” Lodromanean explains. “So you have to prepare for a lot of potential traffic. We have no idea: is this site gonna get five times the regular amount of traffic on election day? Is it going to be 30 times?”
The stakes are high. When a site crashes during breaking news, oftentimes, no one in the affected area has access to critical information. For the 2024 elections, Newspack spent six months preparing for hundreds of local elections across all its publishers. National election results are everywhere, on TV, on major news sites. But mayoral races, ballot measures, and city council results? People go to their local news site for that information, and if the site is down, that coverage simply does not exist.
Then there’s the technical complexity of keeping these sites online. About 70 percent of traffic to news sites is bots and crawlers, all taking up resources, sometimes from readers. Multiply that across hundreds of sites, and the infrastructure demands add up quickly.
Newspack needed proactive monitoring: CPU alerts, uptime checks, and the ability to catch problems before sites go down. But a small engineering team can’t babysit hundreds of sites individually. The infrastructure has to be reliable enough that publishers can focus on journalism instead of worrying whether their site will handle the next traffic spike.
The solution
Newspack needed infrastructure that could handle hundreds of sites with unpredictable traffic. Being part of Automattic gave them access to WP Cloud, the managed WordPress hosting platform that powers WordPress.com.
WP Cloud handles the core infrastructure. The platform provides automated scaling, CDN, security, backups, and performance optimization. With that foundation in place, Newspack’s small engineering team could focus on building what makes the platform valuable for news publishers.
Newspack developed nearly 50 plugins specifically for news publishing. These include revenue tools for subscriptions, memberships, and advertising, along with newsletter systems, SEO optimization, and reader engagement features. A single newsroom would spend thousands of dollars and months building these tools alone.
The reliable infrastructure also enabled custom solutions. When AI crawlers started consuming resources across sites, Newspack built a system that analyzes each site’s robots.txt file and dynamically blocks unwanted bots. When they found a WooCommerce setting causing unnecessary database writes, they toggled it off and saw CPU usage drop by five cores instantly.
For the 2024 US national elections, Newspack implemented proactive alerts and live performance tuning across hundreds of sites. When election night came, all sites stayed online. Publishers reported results instead of troubleshooting servers.
WP Cloud handles infrastructure for hundreds of Newspack sites. Newspack builds news-specific tools and manages technical operations. Publishers focus on journalism. The result of everyone focusing on their strengths is that small organizations get access to capabilities that were previously only available to major news outlets. Scaling is possible with the designation of responsibility.
Impact
A Local Media Association study tracked several Newspack publishers and found significant revenue growth in digital reader revenue:
- The Atlanta Voice: 710% increase
- Houston Defender: 186% increase
- New York Amsterdam News: 283% increase
- Washington Informer: 128% increase
The study credited technology upgrades as a key factor, noting page load time improvements ranging from 82% to more than 3,000% on top-performing articles. Faster loading translates directly to revenue growth through higher ad viewability, more page views, creating additional ad inventory, and improved conversion rates.
The performance improvements also affected how publishers operated during critical moments. The Haitian Times migrated to Newspack in 2021 from another WordPress host. “The site used to crash with any small spike,” says Garry Pierre-Pierre. “And the payment process was clunky.”
But when coverage of the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse drew major traffic, the infrastructure held. “This was the biggest story in a decade, and The Haitian Times was able to provide the stories we were doing without any technical difficulties,” Pierre-Pierre says. Since 2021, The Haitian Times has seen a 40% increase in revenue from readers, advertising, and philanthropy.
At a Knight Foundation’s Media Forum in March, Sonny Messiah Jiles, CEO of the Defender Network, called Newspack “the best thing since sliced bread.”
It’s not often publishers praise their CMS publicly. But the infrastructure reliability changed what her organization could accomplish.
At Newspack, the model has scaled. The platform now serves over 330 news organizations. Sites stayed online during the 2024 election despite unpredictable traffic spikes. Publishers could focus on reporting local election results that major outlets don’t cover.
Takeaways
Newspack demonstrates how small organizations can serve hundreds of customers when they partner with the right infrastructure provider. A team of engineers manages technical operations for over three hundred news sites, handling unpredictable traffic spikes and enabling publishers to focus on journalism instead of server management.
The model works because reliable infrastructure creates leverage. When the foundation is solid, limited resources go toward building differentiation rather than maintaining basic operations. The lessons extend well beyond news publishing.
Key takeaways:
- Infrastructure is a multiplier. When your team isn’t managing servers, troubleshooting hosting problems, or worrying about traffic spikes, those resources go toward building what makes your service valuable. The right infrastructure partner doesn’t just reduce costs. It changes what a small team can accomplish.
- Shared services equals scaling for all. Building 50 specialized plugins would cost a single organization thousands of dollars and months of development time. Spread across hundreds of organizations, and those same tools become affordable. What’s prohibitively expensive for one becomes perfectly reasonable for many.
- Predictability matters more than prediction. You can’t predict or always choose when site traffic will spike 10x or 30x. But you can choose an infrastructure that handles variability. The goal isn’t so much forecasting every possible scenario; it’s partnering with providers who’ve built systems that adapt to unpredictable demands.
- Know what to build versus what to partner on. Newspack builds news-specific plugins, custom AI crawler blocking, and proactive monitoring. They don’t build hosting infrastructure, CDN systems, or automated scaling. Focus limited resources on what differentiates your service.
- Scale enables mission. Nearly a third of Newspack’s customers are publishers of color or serve marginalized communities. These organizations now access the same infrastructure capabilities as major news outlets. Small organizational size doesn’t have to mean small impact.
Consider your organization’s mission. Is it maintaining servers and troubleshooting outages? If not, find a reliable partner who can handle that work so you can focus on advancing your mission. Free your team to focus on what you actually set out to accomplish.
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