Big news to break today: I’ve joined Digital First Media’s Thunderdome team as Senior Developer.
As some of you may be aware of, Digital First Media is the second-largest newspaper chain in the US. Under leadership from the likes of John Paton, Jim Brady, Steve Buttry, and others, DFM is investing heavily in digital, to the tune of $100 million annually over the next three years. Part of this investment is their “Project Unbolt“, and part is other, yet to be announced news products and infrastructure. WordPress will be a key component of the technology stack — and DFM’s Thunderdome team is the place where many experiments are happening.
Five and half years ago (wow how time flies), I wrote “One case against College Publisher” in which I outlined the importance of open source in publishing. Since then, I’ve worked in news largely from the vendor perspective — none of the newsroom opportunities I explored were the right fit. With Digital First Media, I feel like I’ve gotten my big chance at the big leagues. I look forward to helping DFM implement WordPress in a variety of contexts, as well as increasing my contributions to WordPress core, Edit Flow, WP-CLI, and other projects. Open source has a tremendous opportunity to impact news, and the news industry has a tremendous opportunity to contribute to open source.
Check out the announcement on Inside Thunderdome. If you want to join the fun, we’re hiring a frontend developer for my team.