Ask HN: What platform to publish and run a news media in 2025?

3 points by ostaquet 1 year ago | 7 comments

I'm working with a consortium of journalists. They built a news website six months ago based on WordPress and numerous plugins (including a paid theme, GetPaid, and Stripe to process subscriptions).

The website currently receives about 10,000 visits per day with 1,000 subscribers. Their objective is to increase both visits and subscribers 10X. Content syndication and SEO are key to the project's success. They are encountering many limitations and various errors that their tech guy cannot resolve (including performance issues, downtime, SEO tags, and payment problems).

Which platform would you suggest for publishing and running a news media outlet in 2025?

(I have some ideas but I don't want to influence the discussion.)

burnte 1 year ago |

NYTimes runs on Wordpress, so it can scale you just need the engineers to make it work. That said, NYTimes isn't running WP off of a single server. I think what you need is a better/more robust platform engineering team rather than to change the software.

ostaquet 1 year ago | |

I know high traffic media are using successfully Wordpress. My major concern here is the lack of a proper team of Devs/Ops to manage properly the scale. That’s why I consider SaaS platform. However, we are not talking about a hobby website with 100 visitors per day.

burnte 1 year ago | | |

As I said, and as you said, the issue is your dev team. So since you've identified the problem, changing the CMS isn't going to solve your core issue. You need a better dev team.

vFunct 1 year ago |

Django with SaaSPegasus. Lots of control over the interactivity of the site, due to fine-grained data modeling.

ostaquet 1 year ago | |

I didn’t know SaaSPegasus. It looks like a development framework, correct?

toomuchtodo 1 year ago |

404media runs on Ghost.

ostaquet 1 year ago | |

Ghost looks like a solid alternative. Considering the traffic on 404media, it proved the same scalability than WP.

Do you know if they are using the SaaS version or the self hosted version?