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After appearing on the Post Status State of WordPress News roundtable, I felt like I had a bit more to say about my experience with WordPress news.
WordPress news isn't a heavily trafficked topic on the web. How does a publisher build more than just a side gig from putting out WordPress news? How do we define WordPress news?
I asked Kim Coleman, co-founder of Paid Memberships Pro, to see if she had any questions around the topic and if she had any interest in recording a podcast episode about it. Thankfully she was willing to chat and share her questions and her opinions on how we do WordPress news.
If you enjoy today's episode, please say thanks to Kim on Twitter or consider becoming a supporting Producer here at The WP Minute!
Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Matt: It's the WP minute, a special WP minute because I am joined by a special coat. Co-host the title of this episode is called challenges of a WordPress news business. I have my great friend here, the lovely Kim Coleman, Kim, welcome to the program. [00:00:18] Kim: Hi, thanks for having me, Matt. I'll. I want to add who I am before we get too deep, because Everybody knows you. [00:00:25] Nobody knows me, maybe. Well I've been working in WordPress as the line goes from the WordPress rep since I used to rock the Kubrick theme. So I'm a really OJI community member. I spend a lot of time doing site development and moved into products. [00:00:39] And now most notably a WordPress membership plugin paid memberships pro. [00:00:45] Matt: I want to talk about how you and I ended up in this moment of time first. I did. Post status state of the WordPress news. I think they called it and it was a great Twitter space. I'm not a fan of Twitter spaces. Dave, if you're listening, I'm an old school podcast. I like things to be recorded. [00:01:02] I like to sit in our little recording room that we're in now and I don't have to use my phone. So I wanted to, once I was done with that conversation, which again was a fabulous conversation six or seven of us from around the WordPress news space, fantastic conversation. But I felt like I really only scratched the surface on what it's like to, I don't know. [00:01:20] I hate to say run a WordPress news business, but that's the phrase that comes into my head. And Kim, I know that well I've known you for years, right? Ever since I was running my studio, you running your studio, we go way back. But I saw you chatting up others in the WordPress new space on Twitter with some great points, some strong opinion. [00:01:38] I was like, Kim's the perfect person to sit down with to talk about this stuff. And that's how we've ended up in this room today. Is that a fair state? [00:01:45] Kim: Totally fair. Yes. I struggle with opinionated verse. Not because my product does work with a lot of other plugins out there and businesses. So, who you are as an individual and who you are as your business face are an interesting part of these conversations, but yeah, I'll, I'll do my best juggling. [00:02:03] Matt: Kim burying the lead right out of the gate. We're going to talk, we're going to talk about that stuff. So it's Kim I don't wanna say interviewing me, but we, we chatted on some points that we thought were really important to share about news in the WordPress space. And there's so many of us are blogging about WordPress. [00:02:20] We have our opinions, we want to share it. And then there's like a small percentage of us that say, okay, I'm going to do this for a living. Like I'm gonna write about WordPress, whether it's tutorials, development, tutorials, training stuff, or, inside WordPress news. And I know there's a few of you out there especially in the discord server that. [00:02:38] Yeah, that's what you do for a living. You create content around WordPress whether it's eat, soft content, like the tutorial or more of the hard hitting stuff, like the news, you want to figure out how to do it. I've got some opinions to share. And I think Kim has a couple of questions for me [00:02:53] Kim: I want this to be your build in public moment where we talk about Matt report media and what you're doing with the news. And like we said, the title of the show, what are the challenges that we're facing as a community? And what are those things? So I think that's a good kickoff is let's establish, why is it important? [00:03:09] Why is news important in WordPress? We're a multi-billion dollar industry made up of many big and fewer and fewer huge and then thousands of tiny, tiny companies. So why is news important to you? [00:03:23] Matt: I'll give you my, why it's important to me from, from the heart first is because look, it is a, it's a big space. And one of the very first things that I saw coming into the WordPress space was, looking at some colleagues that were, that they were getting the connections, they were getting the projects, they were, selling the plug-ins and the themes. [00:03:47] And I'm talking 50. Plus years ago. And I was just curious, like how, how does this all work? Like as a newcomer into the space, as big as WordPress is today, there's new new people coming in right now, like 70 is installing WordPress probably for the first time, literally, right when we're saying this and they might be thinking, I want to start an agency, I want to do this thing. [00:04:07] Or I just want to know what's happening here. And it was very important for me to be able to quickly learn that and just get a feel for, for the land. And on the surface. That's why it's important for your average WordPress user. Who do I turn to? Where do I go in this WordPress space for the business owner? [00:04:26] Yeah. You want to have somebody who's out there covering, well, this year, specifically acquisitions investments, who's doing what? With products and services you want to have that sort of pulse on, on the. To really know, where your business and what your opportunity is in the, in the marketplace, whatever a CNBC approach of, analyzing the market, but for WordPress and that's something that's interesting, to me, as, as somebody who's in the business side of it. And then I think there's a third leg of, just accountability and transparency. [00:04:59] It, it is a multi-billion dollar industry largely covered on the, under the umbrella of automatic and Matt Mullenweg. And there needs to be just a a critical eye on how things roll out because in an open source community, we're all giving up our time and investing in WordPress. And that's an awesome thing. [00:05:26] Open source is, and WordPress is, it's an awesome thing, but to have folks like Sarah Good. Who really dives deep into some of these stories and analysis to, to, to illustrate the picture to us, to let us decide on whatever heavy topics it might be in the community and the contributor space again, automatic or GoDaddy, like having that critical eye on the space, I think is important. [00:05:52] As narrow as this space really is it drives business for a lot of us, and I, I think that news or content around it is, is important. And that's what it means to me. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or. [00:06:06] Kim: yeah, I think when I reflected on this question, I thought about my customers and I thought about. They're very little involvement in the WordPress community, which we call it the WordPress community. It's the faces you see, on Twitter, maybe in other communities you're in you see them in the hallway track, you see them in in-person or virtual meetups related to WordPre...