Five good reasons why journalists should choose WordPress to get their message out

It took me a while to figure out where I actually belonged in the online world of writers. At first, I thought being a dedicated content writer would pay the bills; then I realized there were people who could use my editing skills to publish their books. All the while I wondered what was going to happen to all those people who, like me, had been trained as journalists on those clunky, messy old anachronisms called typewriters.

They were asking for video submissions from what they called citizen journalists on the local news when it hit me. The same thing was happening to those old print journalists that had happened to record executives with Napster—evolution was calling them to change their stripes or be forgotten.

There were new platforms to get the news out and, on the bright side, there were usually no advertisers to couch the message around online. That meant you could write copy the way you saw it happening or supposed it might and you had complete license to do just that.

New Wave

At the heart of this new wave were the Internet’s new platforms and WordPress has become the undisputed king for journalists looking to get their versions of news and opinions out. That said, here’s five good reasons why it stands head and shoulders above the competition.

• WordPress is the most user friendly. You don’t need much technical background to get started and you can always keep adding to a basic starter theme to build on a design. There are other options available for a CMS like Drupal and these do come with networks of fellow users that can help with a problem, but WordPress clearly allows the message to be the medium with its simplicity that keeps you from getting bogged down.
• There are many different ways to get questions answered with WordPress. There will be questions as you go along and WooThemes forums and WP Questions are just two of the places where you’ll find friendlies more than willing to help.
• You can customize themes. Being original and sometimes fancy with the look of the site is infectious. You may also want to redesign a template to allow for news, opinions, etc. WordPress makes it easy to add and subtract to the basic nuts and bolts.
• Widgets are friendly. You can use these to add a newsletter signup, a Twitter feed, or a host of other interesting and useful items and they’re easy to install.
• The admin screens aren’t too complicated. Like the rest of the WordPress platform, the admin screens are fairly self-explanatory.

These points might all sound like old hat to the bloggers and younger users out there that have grown up with these platforms, but journalists needs to focus on the message and not the medium to makes things work. That’s why WordPress makes for an easier transition from noisy old newsrooms where Underwood typewriters banged away and teletype machines were a constant distraction to the world of sleek black laptops, silent blinking cursors and the ability to publish news from anywhere you can get an Internet connection.