The Express and Star is “Britain’s biggest and best regional newspaper online” and was founded in the 1880s. If you look closely, you’ll notice that their entire site including every article and feature is powered by WordPress. They now take the crown from NY Times for having the best URLs of a news site. (Though the Times now has clean URLs on their blogs.) (32)
I have to admit that when I first saw this post I thought you were talking about the Daily Express (http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/) and the Daily Star (http://www.dailystar.co.uk/) as being users of Wordpress. As it is Expressand Star being a huge regional publicatio is still a significat coup.
Just wondered if anyone else was as confused as I first was!
Pretty amazing what some folks can do using WordPress as the framework.
Yup, that’s absolutely right. The admin page, http://…/wp-admin, is the proof. WordPress can do anything today.
Wow excellent find, clearly shows how good wordpress can be tweaked and implemented.
Biggest and Best?
I’ve spent a couple of months working for Northcliffe Electronic Publishing (Midlands online news publisher) and I’ve never heard about them.
The Express and Star site is indeed great! Is this site based upon a publicly available WP theme? If so which theme and when can it be obtained?
That was a surprise seeing that name in your post. That’s the paper I grew up, far more than the nationals. My sisters and I used to fight about who would get it first. Now isn’t that a different world! Great to see they’ve moved well onto the web.
WoW!
Online newspaper here still use some clunky CMS as their framework. I really hope more of my local news site adopt Wordpress.
They are clean and very organized.
You know what would be cool? A sort of step by step tutorial on how to do something like this. That would be cool.
Hello, Matt, world!
Yes, our main publications
http://www.expressandstar.com
and
http://www.shropshirestar.com
(and several others) all run on WordPress.
Thank-you for your kind words!
The Express & Star is one of the biggest regional newspapers in the UK — 143,522 print circ (August); 162,820 monthly uniques (April).
WordPress, making URLs prettier all across the Internet!
It easy to tell a site using wordpress, type ‘wp-admin’ after the URL. If a WordPress login screen comes up, or .htaccess, they use wordpress.
“Smallest and pretty good”
We started a “Hometown Online News” site with WP in March this year. Just a micro market (a little town of 25K people) not much compared to them but the town loves it!
Thanks Matt!
Nice find. I’ll toss my hat into the ring here and show off http://albanyhighcougar.com/ as another excellent WP newspaper site. It’s the site I run for my high school paper.
One thing that has always puzzled me about using any CMS out there is how to incorporate into the daily workflow of a newspaper. In the traditional sense, a magazine or newspaper is divided into sections, contained within issues, contained within volumes. The “now” nature of the Internet says that those notions should be tossed out the window, but it really helps tie into the print editions.
I can see how WordPress’s categories (and now tags?) create the basics for sections, but the task of building a librarian-friendly archive is a bit tricky. Take a look at their archive link and you can see that even this newspaper doesn’t even attempt to solve that quandary.
I can think of many college and community newspapers that would jump at the opportunity to run WordPress if these issues could be wrangled.
Stephen, I see it easier than that. WordPress already has a form of issues, ideal for magazines or newspapers.
How about a monthly magazine where the ‘day’ is removed from permalinks, then you have a near perfect view of the October issue at http://website/2007/10/ or for a daily newspaper go to http://website/2007/11/02/ for a look at the 2nd Nov.
The really difficult part is not the web end, but the print end and getting the journalists/editors etc to post content to the web within their normal workflow.
Wordpress can be used as online newspaper, no doubts.
We thought of a CMS when we started a citizen-journalism site a week ago, covering the five Nordic countries in their own languages. We even included an english version.
Starting out with a CMS, we ended up with Wordpress, based on the Revolution theme. Now we all feel happy about that.
Just wondering why they don’dt have a mention of Wordpress on the frontpage. Are they not required to mention Wordpress?
Don´t wonder, rtfm.
http://wordpress.org/about/gpl/
hi from Italy! This is our videomagazine http://www.videocomunicazioni.com
we have about 30 journalist working on it an 5 video director uploading video working at the same time.
ciao
Drats. I tried to do this same idea when I was the editor of a paper in Harker Heights, Texas but my know how of Wordpress was extremely limited at the time. I had hoped to get something setup that could be used by papers everywhere but alas in my frustration I gave up. Glad to see someone found a way around my frustration 
To solve the issue problem, we use a custom template and apache rewrite rules to offer one list of articles for any given publication day…
The front page is essentially this same template, but with a few hooks thrown in for stuff not published in an issue, but essentially content that is exclusive to the web.
Even with the date-based system, you would still need to tie in a list of issues/volumes to coordinate with a particular publishing date. My college newspaper was a weekly, so each issue had was moved from a “next” status (the one we were working on that week) to a “current” status to make it live.
It’s a simple workflow that would allow you to publish an entire week’s worth of content at once, all with the same publish date. But again, it is one that allows the print version to dictate the way the online version operates.
Great site, and great finding too. That shows how flexible Wordpress are
Share your thoughts