Welcome

The WordPress Media Corps is a new experimental project that aims to enable independent WordPress marketers and media members to produce excellent quality content with less time and effort.

Why a WordPress Media Corps?

WordPress media play an important role in promoting WordPress initiatives and fostering engagement within the community. However, staying informed about the project’s key developments is challenging and requires frequent navigation of people and scattered sources of information.

Having a central or direct avenue for news through WP Media Corps could help streamline for media partners to get accurate, consistent updates and enhance the flow of information that needs more awareness—ultimately fostering more a informed community and audience that can contribute to the project’s growth.

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What does this look like in practice?

The WordPress Media Corps project is intentionally adopting a limited scope that we can confidently manage to test the viability and assumptions necessary to achieve the desired goal.

In practice, this means the experiment will focus on compiling updates and news across the project that would benefit from increased awareness and getting them to WordPress media partners and marketers more readily through regular meetings.

Check out the WordPress Media Corps Initial Roadmap for more details about the scope.

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What is out of this experiment’s scope?

  • Promoting media providers on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ platforms: The Media Corps will provide information to external partners so that they can have accurate, high-quality content. However, external content won’t be promoted through links, WordPress social platforms, WordPress Planet, or others.
  • Delivering embargoed or exclusive information: Current sensitive content, mainly release names or security releases, will remain discreet due to their nature.
  • Interview requests: While the Media Corps can help point media folks in the right direction for additional information, facilitate connections/points of contact, and funnel requests to what we can manage right now, the team will not be responsible for arranging interview requests for now.
  • Addressing broader PR activities and non-WordPress outlets or marketers as part of this experiment: All ideas for the current WP Media Corps concept are welcome, but it is worth reiterating that it will not be possible to cover those outside the scope and resources at this time.

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Media partners criteria

The WP Media Corps will initially comprise of partners that meet the following criteria:

  • Have a focus on producing content that is at least 80% about WordPress
  • Report factual news or produce relevant educational content
  • Maintain high standards of content quality and journalistic integrity
  • Adhere to WordPress community guidelines
  • Respect information sensitivities (if any)

Media folks can express their interest and self-certify (via a form) that they meet the criteria before participating in the Media Corps experiment and briefings. See this call for participation for details.

You can find the list of participants and their self-assessment form responses in this spreadsheet (excluding some specific fields hidden to respect their privacy).

Please note: The information shared in the linked spreadsheet is intended solely to facilitate collaboration and transparency within the Media Corps project. It is not to be used for unsolicited marketing purposes. If you see any misuse of this information, please report it in the Media Corps SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel so it can be addressed accordingly.

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How do we measure success?

  • Media partner engagement and feedback: Number of qualified media partners engaging, attending meetings, and participating in our channel. We should also assess efficiency and satisfaction with the WP Media Corps. Understand if media partners find the initiative helpful in having the latest information and reducing the time/effort required to find what they need and produce content.
  • Media coverage/quality and quantity of WP content produced: This can include blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc. Track media coverage and evaluate if the content meets the requirements set for qualification, accurately communicates information, its potential reach, etc.

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Additional resources

For more details and additional context about the Media Corps project, you can refer to these posts:

Those interested in participating and following along are welcome to join the #media-corps Slack channel.

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