Inside WP Engine Newsroom with Jason Konen: A WordPress Suite for Modern Publishing Workflows

Speaker A Welcome to Within WordPress, the podcast about WordPress. What do you know? With me today is someone who I spoke to not too long ago. I received a demo because I was curious about a new. I don't know if we even can call it a tool because I think it's a lot more than a tool. I think it's a whole way of solving a very big problem. But all that to say. Welcome Jason,

Speaker B Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Speaker A Yeah, well I'm happy to see you again because like I said, I had a curiosity. I saw something and there was a demo which taught me a whole lot more and that made me even more curious. So let's start with, before we say what the demo was about, maybe you can share a little bit more about yourself first and then.

Speaker B Yeah, absolutely. So from there, yeah, I'm Jason Conan, I go by JK because everywhere I go there's a lot of Jason's. I like to joke there's an Argos of Jason's.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B In fact, my engineering counterpart I'll probably

Speaker A mention a few times, that's a good

Speaker B one, is a JSON. So just to distinguish me from other jsons, but I've been in tech oh well since the turn of the century and that's like a weird thing to sort of say, but I started life as a front end web developer back in the browser wars era. I was hand coding HTML and CSS and JavaScript and did the translation from table layouts to div layouts and all of those things and then sort of witnessed CMSs starting to come onto the scene, movable type, WordPress and others. And as my career matured and got into some other things, I ended up gravitating towards product management. So I've been doing that for a number of years now.

Speaker A So from building software to product management, that's not a common route.

Speaker B No, but it served me really well because I've always been able to sort of speak both languages, the technical language and understand how things are put together, but also the value and the capabilities that the humans actually using the software need. And so it served me very well having a view into both worlds over time. But I was at a number of startups and some of those had really successful exits. Ended up at Microsoft for a while, which is very different than being at a startup.

Speaker A Oh, I believe that.

Speaker B And then my journey took me to getting connected with the tech scene in Austin, Texas and that ultimately led me to WP Engine, where then for about four and a half years I led our Headless offering, formerly called Atlas for a number of years, and now I'm leading our newsroom product line. And product line again, I think to your point, isn't really the right way to talk about it. It's something more.

Speaker A It is. So some of my clients are publishers, which is why I was curious, what is newsroom? When I saw. What was it called? Couple of weeks ago, when I saw the news of the newsroom being introduced, I was curious, like, what is it? What kind of problems for the publisher world is it solving? Because like, again, like I said, again, I have a few clients who are nothing more than a, A publishing house, bunch of editors pumping out content. People are constantly working, trying to. There's probably about a dozen articles being pushed out every single day, and they've been doing that for 20 years. So as, as those teams grow, they run into all these weird types of, oh, but can we do this? Can we do that? And I've, you know, I have a system for them that works, but I also know it's never perfect. So I was super intrigued to go, hey, this sounds like it's right up my alley. Can you show me more? And you did. And yeah, I think this is something more people need to be aware that it exists. So it's not a tool, I would say it's a suite. It's like a collection of things suite.

Speaker B I think early on when we were thinking about marketing, they suggested operating system as a good analogy. And I was kind of like, I don't think so.

Speaker A Yeah, it's a layer lower. Yeah.

Speaker B But like, if you think about like a lot of different capabilities, you know, and the analogy with an operating system is there's a lot of capabilities there, but my workflow and what I need to do today within that is different than yours, which is different than another person's. Right?

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And so from that standpoint, it is like kind of a similar concept. It's like it's a collection of things that all work interoperably together to solve different challenges and different workflows for, for, for people. And in particular, when working together, collaborating and generating a lot of content. Right. As we see in the publishing industry.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And, and so maybe it's not an exact analogy, but there is some similarity there, right?

Speaker A Yeah, I mean, I think so. Operating system, like you said, for me, that's a level below. But the, I don't know, when you demo this, there was quite a few, like, ah, that's neat. Like, that's actually solving a problem. And it's very Tempting to say, can you demo this now? So anybody watching the podcast can see, but the vast majority is listening, so we're not going to do that.

Speaker B Right.

Speaker A What would be the most important reason that you were triggered to go into, oh, this is a solution we need to solve.

Speaker B Right. Well, I mean that goes right back into. You're like, oh, how this solves a problem, that solves a real problem. And part of what has always interested me about software programming and things like that is software's supposed to solve problems. It's supposed to make things easier. Right. That's its goal. Right. But like anything, it's not perfect and sometimes it gets in the way and it actually makes things harder. And as a, you know, like a product innovator, I look at that and like, well, these are, these are opportunities to make things better. Right. And so like the root of everything that I like to do and where I get, you know, my energy from is solving problems, like real tangible problems. Not me off with a whiteboard thinking just somebody has this problem, but like not really talking to people doing work.

Speaker A I, I saying, I recently spoke to somebody saying exactly that. Like not vibe coding myself out of a problem I invented myself. That's great, right?

Speaker B Yeah, well, you know, you know, there's things with like, well, necessity is the mother of all invention. And yeah, but, well, you have this problem, others do too. But that's not always true.

Speaker A No.

Speaker B And so talking to, knowing that there's a sizable amount of, you know, newsrooms, media businesses, publishing houses using WordPress. Because WordPress is a fantastic long form editorial tool.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And rightfully so. But there's always going to be toil things that don't work, things that are hard to do. And those are all it's like, well, what if we put some time and effort making that better? And that's really the, the genesis of any good product is what if we made something better? What if we, what if we provided value, solved problems, made your lives easier so you can do your work because your work isn't, you know, as a, as a journalist, isn't managing the tech and dealing with all of the problems. No, no, no, it shouldn't be writing. Yeah, right.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah. The thing that I found one of the most interesting approaches of. So if you are a publishing house, for those of you who don't have clients like this, or maybe you have a client that has a blog and they regularly blog, that is an entirely different world from an actual publishing house having anywhere from live covering to a multitude of editors working on the same piece, giving each other's feedback and processing it and then, and resulting into sometimes one, sometimes a series of articles. All of those sort of things bring in a level of complexity that unless you've actually worked with clients like that, it's kind of like, I don't, I get that it's complex, but I don't actually get it. If you were to say like the size of the teams, what the solution when you were starting to hash out what it has to do, and I'd love to touch on a few features later, but yeah. What type of teams were you looking at? Were you specifically looking at the journalistic and high volume type or is it a large team? Did you have a spec specific group of journalists in mind?

Speaker B Yeah, it's sort of, you know, everybody has different definitions for these, like what's enterprise, what's mid market and so on. But like you sort of say, are you big enough where, you know, you're publishing several articles a day and you have several journalists working or more and you have people needing to collaborate and work together. That's very different, as you said, from like a blog where you have one person doing something and owning it all. As soon as you make that move into, there's a team or teams of people responsible for getting a product out because the content is the product in this industry.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B I think we have to remember that is why do these businesses exist? They exist to sell a product. Their product is content. Right. And the bigger they are, the more people involved. Just like anything, it gets complex. There's governance and approvals and different skill sets that come in. It's not one person doing everything. And so when you move into that realm, sort of the general purpose side of WordPress gets a little harder to work with. Right. And we have, we had a longtime partnership with an agency out of the UK called Big Bite. And I got to know them a couple years ago. They're one of their founders, Jason Agnew, another Jason. And we just sort of hit it off on trying to solve problems and we found like kind of kindred spirit in how we approach the world and how we approach using technology to solve real problems and the care behind it. And he and his team had deep experience with these very large enterprise newsrooms.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B And as an agency they were constantly reinventing the wheel. Every project because it's project based. And you know, it's like, yeah, there was some stuff that could, you know, be reused and there was, you know, everybody's got their own tool bag of things to you do. But fundamentally it was rebuilding over and over and over again. And that's not a unique problem to them because I hear it from other agency partners and other developers. And so Jason and I sort of said, well, what if we built software that sits on top, that is common, is meant to work together and solves a lot of the common challenges that people have in these larger businesses because we, we know what they are and you know, there's many of them and then, you know, there's so many, it's like, well, which ones do you tackle? Yep, right. And then do that in a way that leans into the, the natural strengths of WordPress. Right. And, and that is WordPress is this really extensible product platform. Maybe that's the operating system that you can do anything with. That's also daunting. When you have a blank canvas and you're not an artist, what do you do? How do you do this? Right. And that's, it's like, well, what if we gave a really solid foundation and starting point for all the common problems that constantly get reinvented and then do it in a way where we can say, hey, we've solved this also, it's customizable and extensible so that we know and acknowledge every business works differently and has different needs. But if you have this common sort of technical language between all of the things to the user that really matters, the journalist, content editor, approver, the person working on SEO, whatever job they have, it all works together.

Speaker A Those are interesting. The ones that you just mentioned. Now if you've only worked with publishing teams where it's a handful of people, they're pretty much all of them do the same work. Right? They write it. Once they're done writing it, they maybe hand it off to somebody else to double check it for them. But they're the ones also doing the SEO part. They're doing the ones who are adding the images. That's generally the same person. And the most complicated it gets is there's an editor in place who is doing the final set off. That's about it. What you demoed was, I mean, I really love that approach where all of the roles you just mentioned, they had their own interface into the content. That was ultimately the published post. You should say, I should probably say, but it didn't feel like it. So can you explain me a little bit more about what if I am an SEO specialist and I get to work with Newsroom, what is different for me and the same for media and the same for editor? Because those three are super interesting.

Speaker B Yeah, well, it's looking at the different jobs to be done. We have to produce an article, what are the jobs to be done? And smaller scale, you might wear all of the hats and do all of the jobs.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B In the larger scale, there are people that have expertise and do those jobs separately. And sometimes there's a mixture of those things. But regardless if it's one person or if it's a bunch of people working, having a dedicated user experience to taking care of that job is really valuable. And rather than saying, this one interface, which is beautifully built for editing and layout, also should serve SEO and managing media and all of the other jobs to be done. And we say, well, no, actually it's not. You know, that's why, you know, UX and designers and people exist, is to say, no, actually there, there are workflows that are better suited to different layouts, different designs, different ways of working, and you can increase efficiency by dealing with that and giving them the right experience for the job to be done. And so we broke those out into separate interfaces and we focused on those three to start to say like, these are probably the most common, important things that get done by different people in larger newsrooms. The journalist isn't always the SEO person and the person out there in the field taking photos and getting permissions and approvals for photos isn't the journalist. And they, you know, like, there's different jobs. So give them a place where it's easy for them to work and then on top of that you solve a collaboration challenge. It's like, well, now they have a different place to work. You can have those different jobs to be done. Being done simultaneously. Yeah, and you know, that's not just like Google, like collaboration, we can talk about that. But like, no, it's like there's a different person responsible for this. Give them the tools to do their job.