Around two-thirds of smaller and medium-sized publishers use WordPress as their CMS (that’s content management system for the newbies) — but how many publishers can say they’ve developed a sustainable business model?

The optimistic answer: More in 2019 (the realistic answer: unclear), or at least they’ll get closer to cobbling it together.

WordPress.com is launching a new toolkit, called Newspack, for small and mid-sized publishers to streamline their technical decisions — and make choices that add to the potential of finagling a business model. Kinsey Wilson, former digital guru at NPR and The New York Times and now WordPress.com’s president, is leading the initiative, working with the News Revenue Hub and Spirited Media as development partners…

“It’s not simply a CMS for a newsroom,” Wilson said, “but a full business system that enables publishing and monetization at the same time.”

Read the full story at NiemanLab.org

When Kinsey Wilson was leading digital transformation at USA Today 15 years ago, WordPress was emerging from a single bit of code that helped pretty up typography for casual writing.

Since then, Wilson went on to spearhead digital change at NPR and at the New York Times, and WordPress became the world’s biggest self-hosted blogging tool, powering 29 percent of all sites on the web.

This morning, Automattic Inc., announced that Wilson would become president of its flagship commercial venture, the WordPress.com publishing platform. That effort integrates social and ad tools for some of the leading digital publishers.

Read the full interview at Poynter.