Hi everyone: Lots going on in the world of WordPress and Automattic this summer — we helped launch brand new sites from ESPN, Time Inc., and News Corp.; WordCamp Europe was the largest WordCamp ever; Longreads partnered with The Marshall Project; and Automattic is gearing up for the launch of .blog domains for websites later this year.
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What’s New with Publishers on WordPress
- The Undefeated is the new site from ESPN exploring the intersections of race, sports, and culture. It’s edited by the great Kevin Merida, formerly of the Washington Post, and we’ve already seen features on Marshawn Lynch, Steph Curry, and a must-read about the inequality of high-priced youth baseball.
- WordPress.com VIP helped Time Inc. launch a new vertical for People — Home & Travel. (Let’s take a look inside Khloé Kardashian’s medicine cabinet.)
- Other new site launches from the WordPress.com VIP team included News Corp.’s The Sun, IndieWire, The Denver Post, Awesomeness TV, and The Root.
- The latest cover story from Fortune: “Who Will Build the Next Great Car Company?”
- Longreads teamed up with The Marshall Project for this outstanding essay by Issac Bailey: “The Day My Brother Took a Life and Changed Mine Forever”; and we continued our collaboration with Atlas Obscura, with Alex Mar’s “What Ever Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?”
- “With a single vote, England just screwed us all.” At Fusion, Felix Salmon delivered a morning-after assessment of #Brexit.
- “The Club Became Like a Home” — Reflections on Orlando.
- What the $@#%: Meet the founders of Strong Language, a blog for linguists, lexicographers, and word nerds who like vulgarities.
- Jennifer K. Armstrong, author of the forthcoming Seinfeldia, chats with the NBC Executive who worked with Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David during their first season of the show.
- Christie Aschwanden at FiveThirtyEight has some fighting words: “The 5K, Not The Marathon, Is The Ideal Race.”
- “13, Right Now.” Jessica Contrera, in The Washington Post, on the screen life of a teenage girl.
What’s New with Automattic and WordPress
- Coming soon: .blog domains for websites.
- WordCamp Europe came to Vienna last week, and it was the largest WordCamp ever hosted. Here’s WP Tavern’s recap of Matt Mullenweg’s Q&A with Brian Krogsgard.
- Blogging U., our series of free educational guides on writing, design, and building the perfect site for your small business, got an awesome makeover — you can now sign up for them anytime, and get new lessons delivered right to your inbox.
- On WordPress.com, we introduced a new SEO settings dashboard to give users deeper control of their site’s SEO.
- Three Automattic employees talk about their work with Grow Leadership Academy, which equips recent South African high school grads with skills for a tight job market.
- The Art of Customer Support: Our field notes from SupConf in San Francisco, and here’s a talk that our own Andrew Spittle gave about “building a career in support.”
- Want to speak at December’s WordCamp US in Philadelphia? Apply now.
Memos 