Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Technophobes, beware! The following post gets pretty deep into the weeds…
When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source WordPress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.
WordPress, which was created in 2003 and is maintained by a community of programmers, has become popular because of its user-friendly control panel and its virtually-infinite customizability. It is open-source and completely free, written in the popular Web programming language PHP.
The Gazette launched its new WordPress site in the middle of the summer, using a modified template purchased from WooThemes.com. Radio Iowa’s relaunch happened this week, using a pre-designed template called Thesis. (The theme running on the Iowa Independent is a completely custom design.)
The WordPress platform is by no means a silver bullet, and it takes a fair amount of work to keep it running in high-traffic environments. In the days after the Gazette’s switch to WordPress, the site experienced downtime or debilitating errors for minutes (and even an hour) at a time. When traffic spikes for the first time for Radio Iowa’s new site, it could have similar problems. We certainly did when we were first getting things situated on our server. It’s unavoidable.
But the switch to WordPress portends a promising trend among mid-sized news outlets. Rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on customized, proprietary software to run their sites, organizations like the Gazette and Radio Iowa are finding that excellent Web sites are virtually free. It still costs money to host a site and to design its template, but those costs are tiny compared to the cost of a large IT staff.
This means that even in a business climate where online advertising costs much less than offline advertising, news Web sites don’t have to cost more money than they bring in.
Open-source software like WordPress is perhaps the only hope journalists have of developing a sustainable online model, with low overhead and easy-to-use controls that don’t take years for writers to master. It’s encouraging that more news outlets in Iowa are using it.
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