Newspack: A New WordPress Platform To Offer Blockchain Features

Consensys, a blockchain firm has made a joint venture with news industry to develop a revenue-generating news platform by WordPress as per recent news posted on Jan14. A new publishing platform “Newspack” is being launched which is supported by ‘Google’, Ethereum development studio ‘Consensys’ and more with blockchain features built in with it. Released in the year 2003, WordPress is the most popular website management system in the world. This online CMS is used by more than 60 million websites which include CNN, Quartz & Time.com. In the year 2012, WordPress integrated Bitcoin as a payment option in order to upgrade the CMS claiming that “unlike credit cards and PayPal, Bitcoin has no central authority and no way to lock entire countries out of the network.”

According to an announcement made on Monday, the newly launched product “News Pack” is a cheaper platform which provides technology along with the support to the small as well as medium-sized news organization.
Google invested around $1.2 million in Newspack while on the other hand, Consensys made a contribution of $350000. Similarly, an investment of $400,000 and $250,000 were made by Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation respectively. A total of around $2.4 million in funding has been secured in the first year initiative by WordPress’ parent company Automattic and its partners Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub.

It was confirmed by Consensys representative that Newspack will be enabled to use blockchain-based features through ConsenSys-backed Civil Media. Civil Media claims to deploy digital assets to save journalism. He also added that Civil’s Publisher product enables newsrooms to permanently archive content on a decentralized network, will be installed as a plugin on the WordPress platform for any newsroom to use. It will also provide access to discovery portal for the consumers who are seeking news. “The plugin will also act as a portal that will walk newsrooms through how to join the Civil Registry, the hub of community-vetted and -approved newsrooms.”

Civil faced some issues including a failed token based fundraiser which had to be relaunched. The company assisted a news site to archive a full article on Ethereum blockchain in December. Associated Press declared that it would collaborate with Civil on content licenses featuring blockchain technology in August 2018.