How to Tell If Your WordPress News Is Really Newsworthy

Rae Morey:
Welcome to Content Sparks Media Playbook. I’m Rae Morey from the repository and I’m joined by a new co host today, someone who lives and breathes WordPress news and media and public relations, Adam Weeks.

Adam Weeks:
Hey, Adam, Nice to be here, Rae. Thank you so much for that lovely invitation. So what are we doing today?

Rae Morey:
So Adam’s going to be joining me on these podcasts moving forward and we’re going to be talking about how businesses don’t developers in the WordPress ecosystem can better engage with the media and how they can leverage the media for their own promotion and brand awareness. It’s not just about getting attention, but how to build relationships, how to pitch stories the right way and actually understand how the media works.

Adam Weeks:
That’s fantastic. Well, I am super honored to be on here. I have clients that are just dying to get covered by the work that you do, Rae. And so when Bob was just discussing this and like, oh yes, I do want to talk to Rae, because this is absolutely perfect. I do work in this space all day long with companies that are wanting to get exposure, get good PR on places like the repository and other publications outside of WordPress. Let’s start with this question. Let’s get this going with our title. Is it News or just an Update? So let’s. I’m going to throw that question back to you real quick. How do we tell if something is news in WordPress?

Rae Morey:
That is an interesting question. Honestly, I think the important thing to ask yourself is who is it news for? Just because something’s exciting for yourself or internally, it doesn’t mean necessarily that it has a broader relevance. Every time news in the WordPress space needs to mean something to more than you and your own team or customers, that’s a really important thing to remember. You know, if you’re putting news out there and you’re looking for coverage, it’s important to think, is this news going to be interesting to that publication’s audience? Are they going to care?

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, I do an interesting thing. I get paid to tell my clients things that they don’t want to hear, such as you’ve Got a great company and nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. They’re busy doing their own thing. And if you have a story to tell, if you want to get that out there, how you construct that story, there’s a lot of processes to it. There’s a lot of things that you really want to think through as to whether or not it belongs in a publication such as the Repository. And I think this is such an interesting topic and one that I feel a number of our WordPress companies don’t always get right. I have seen blog posts that could have been a strong news story. They’ve come out fairly recently and like, oh, that was neat. And I scrolled by, but there’s a story there and a missed opportunity. Have you seen those types of things come across? As someone who is looking for stories.

Rae Morey:
All the time? All the time. I’ve got a couple of examples. I won’t mention them, but definitely, I think. I don’t know whether it’s. In some cases, there are probably people who don’t want what they publish to be news. They want to share their views, but don’t necessarily want it to be picked up widely. And I understand that there’s definitely nuance to that. And then conversely, you see people publish tweets or they might get in touch with me or others in kind of the media space, looking for coverage for what they’re doing, and it’s like, oh, that’s just not news. Sorry, I have to politely turn you down. I mean, the thing with news, and we’ll dig into how to define what it is, but, you know, news has to. Has to affect, involve or interest the WordPress community. There has to be a public interest. You know, you have to think about who cares about my story. Obviously you’d care about it yourself, but do other people really care?

Adam Weeks:
Other people care, yeah.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. So I guess some. Some examples of actual news might be things like, you know, major product launches or big shifts for companies. You know, like trying to think of a good example. So recently, for example, 10 up did a big rebrand with Fuel recently. That’s news, unfortunately, haven’t had a lot of time to cover it, but that’s a big direction. They made it very clear in there an announcement that this was a lot to do with AI and so this was like a shift in that path for that company. So that’s news. Big company milestones are news, too. There are a lot of companies in the WordPress that are getting on 15, 20 years in age, and there Might be milestones like a 15 or 20th anniversary. And you know, what’s this mean for the company, what they achieved so far? That’s something to celebrate. And I think that’s news, especially in the, in the WordPress space. You know, company initiatives that are a bit different from the norm or unique. Big contributions to WordPress, if particularly companies like Multidots, I guess would be an example. That’s working with WordPress Core on the collaborative phase of Gutenberg. That’s a good story. And yeah, other things going on in WordPress at the moment. That’s definitely news. And I guess everything else.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, like. Well, oftentimes news is negative, right? Like, what would you say is like the percentage of like a news stories that get published that are negative versus positive? Do you have a, an idea of like where that balances?

Rae Morey:
Oh God. It brings me back to studying journalism at university. And the thing is, people are drawn towards reading bad news, unfortunately. Yeah. So I’m very conscious of that in my own reporting. Unfortunately, if something is quite a big deal, you can’t avoid reporting some bad news. But yeah, I don’t know. I was very conscious after kind of expanding the repository last October and November and December and, and publishing so much about the WordPress drama that I just really wanted to focus on some other things because I was hearing from a lot of people in the community too. You know, everyone was just feeling pretty drained and worn out by the ongoing drama. So that’s something that I’m really keen to report more about, you know, good news. Like WordPress Campus Connect is such a really lovely story. So that was something I did recently. I’m really excited to see the WordPress AI team. And by the time this podcast is out, you would have read my story about the interview I did earlier today actually with James LePage and Fearless Arts. So I’m keen to get that out. So there are good stories in amongst everything. And just because there are bad things going on in the community doesn’t mean that we can’t have good stories too. They don’t cancel each other out.

Adam Weeks:
So goes to the intentionality that people who are in charge of the marketing for their company who are charged of the messaging for their company, you have to be intentional about this. It’s not easy necessarily to do this. Like, this is hard work, but it’s worthwhile work. It’s important work because the default for a lot of news outlets will be to run with just negative coverage because everybody loves a good train wreck. That’s sort of a Natural human tendency. Like, ooh, what’s happening over there? How is that falling apart? But like you said, we got to cover other stuff. There’s other good stuff happening. And I do love that’s what you focus on as much as possible in the repository. The good, the positive. And I think that’s fantastic.

Rae Morey:
Thank you. That there are definitely some media outlets that focus a lot on the negative. I think that’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re looking for coverage or when your clients are looking for coverage too. Adam. Choosing or reaching out to media who have a reputation for putting out good stories and not just digging into the drama, that’s definitely something that you do see a lot of in this space. Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Weeks:
So what I’d like to do real quick is kind of throw out a couple of ideas at you and you tell me whether or not you feel that would be newsworthy or not. All right, let’s do some. Off the top of my head, we’ve got some ideas. An agency lands a big new client, a client that they normally wouldn’t have gotten. So it’s the biggest client they’ve ever landed. Is. And maybe it’s in an interesting tech space. Is that newsworthy?

Rae Morey:
No, thank you. No, it’s not. I mean, that is massive news internally for the company and definitely something to share with your own employees. It’s a really big win. Definitely understand that, because I’ve felt that too. But does the wider community care? Probably not.

Adam Weeks:
Nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.

Rae Morey:
The small clapping hands. Good work. Yeah, sorry. No, that’s. That’s not news.

Adam Weeks:
All right, so a. Let’s do a plugin company is doing something that is a shift on and how AI is used in WordPress. And as far as anybody knows, no one is currently utilizing AI in this way, and they’re the first ones to do that. Is that getting close to news?

Rae Morey:
Yeah, that’s getting close to news. This is actually something I’ve been thinking about a lot in how I cover AI. There’s just a. There’s a lot happening in AI at the moment, and because it’s shifting so quickly, it’s hard to cover every single product that’s coming out and saying, you know, writing a big story about it. The way I’m approaching this myself, I can’t speak for a lot of other media. They might have a look at this differently, but I would see this as part of a broader story. So I’m actually working on a feature story at the moment that’s involving several businesses. And their innovative approaches to AI to kind of show how the landscape is shifting. So, yeah, I would see this as part of a broader story.

Adam Weeks:
I’ve got two more. A hosting company learns that a competitor had a large outage and that their clients were offline for hours and hours. Is that news?

Rae Morey:
This reminds me of something I saw on LinkedIn just this week. I won’t name names. Look, I would not touch this myself because it is competition and I wouldn’t say it’s news. It might be something that you ask other people outside if it wasn’t. If me, who used to work in PR would advise, like, get people outside of your business to start tweeting about it. Look, if you started contacting media outlets about a story, they would probably not want to touch it. Unless. Unless it was one of those media outlets that loves a bit of scandal. Yeah. But really it just comes across as a bit mean.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. All right, last one. Let’s say that there is a company that really believes in the. In WordPress, in the community and in WordPress, and they want WordPress to grow. So there’s an initiative to bring in young people. So maybe they do a course they. Through YouTube and they have classes that are free, that are geared towards younger teenagers, kids learning how to use WordPress. Would that be news?

Rae Morey:
Yeah, I would say so. I think it’s very timely and relevant at the moment. It reminds me a lot of WordPress Campus Connect and what they’ve been able to do that. I mean, obviously Anand’s been able to grow that into something bigger through a lot of really meaningful promotion for. For the event. He did a lot of, you know, not only spent all that time running the initial events last October in India, but also promoting it a lot. He did a WordPress camp and WordPress talk and all of that before approaching Mary to talk about the team. But I think, you know, generational change and bringing younger voices into WordPress is definitely something that there’s been a lot of talk about, often a lot of questions at Q&As at flagship webcam. So I think that is, yeah, definite, definitely news. If it was just. Look, there’s definitely layers to this too. If it was just a small webinar with a half a dozen people. No, that’s not a story. But if it was something kind of a bit bigger that had that, you could show some. Some real, real life ROI. Like, one of the nice things about Campus Connect when it was held in India last October was that a lot of students then went away and Created websites for their family business or went and spoke to business owners in this their local area and created mock ups of real life businesses. So that was a tangible outcome from that event. So yeah, I would say it’s definitely news but the scale of news is. Sorry, something to.

Adam Weeks:
Something to think the bottom of it.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, something more like a brief. Yeah. But I would say in the broader scale of things that could be, it could be a really good story if it gained a bit more momentum and there was tangible outcomes there.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, yeah, I know I said I only do two but I thought of one more than partnerships. When companies partner with another company that may be unexpected, does that count as news?

Rae Morey:
Yeah, this is something that a lot of companies reach out to me about. I’m very interested in. Yeah, in partnerships in the WordPress space. I think if it’s two companies that are doing a small integration between their plugins, probably not so much. Yes, that’s very interesting for both of their sets of customers. But if it’s to kind of bigger companies in the space who are partnering and they can explain the. So what? So we might go through a checklist shortly. But if they can explain why this partnership is a big deal. Yeah, that’s definitely a story.

Adam Weeks:
Over to WooCommerce.com before we get to the checklist. I think that our listeners and viewers will appreciate how. When is it news? I’d like to dream a little bit, inspire some people a little bit. Where have you seen or how have you seen good publicity benefit companies? What is actually maybe at stake here and is there anything that would like. Oh no, we really do need to focus on this. Have you seen any times where that’s been a big win for their company and they can point to that new story as helping their company?

Rae Morey:
I don’t know if it’s pointing to specific news stories but I think it’s building reputation and brand awareness over time. It’s I mean it all comes back to Marketing 101, right? Having multiple touch points that people can. Might not even remember over time or over years, but it all builds into people remembering who you are and just knowing you have a good reputation. So there are definitely a lot of businesses in the space that don’t do a lot of promotion. Might just post how to’s on their blog or tutorials, but don’t do any, you know, don’t post on their announcements. They don’t have an announcements page on their website sharing what their updates are. Don’t reach out to a lot of, you know, content creators and media in this space. There’s definitely benefits to building relationships with WordPress media. Not just myself, but you know, the WP minute, WP builds, reaching out. And even if you don’t have specific news to share, like I’ve had some company owners just send me a quick DM in Slack, just introducing themselves and their product and yeah, just saying, look, I just want to you to, you know, just to be on your radar and to know we’re around and if there’s anything I can help with. Yeah, please get in touch. So it doesn’t have to be a big news announcement, but starting to build those building blocks. Anyway, back to. Sorry, the question. Yeah, remind me. It was, it was about.

Adam Weeks:
It’s like, what’s at stake here? Like why, why is this important for these companies? But that you kind of answered that, but yeah. Any other, any other thoughts on that?

Rae Morey:
Yeah, look, I immediately come to mind this one business that could be doing a lot of promotion. I won’t. But over, over time laying all these breadcrumbs of, you know, like someone like James LePage who I interviewed today, he is a great communicator and really good at talking about the work he’s doing in AI and his vision for it. You know, he hasn’t been in the WordPress space for a really long time, but he’s made an impact and that’s because he proactively talks about what he’s doing. He’s very happy too. He always says yes when I reach out to him for an interview. So that I can see, you know, he’s already building a really strong reputation in the space. And then there are people who, and not everybody wants to be promotional, not everybody wants to build their own personal brand. So there are just, there are different ways that you can promote what you’re doing that can be a game changer thinking about, I guess the medium to long term about where you want your business to go. Because if you just plot along and don’t do a lot of these kind of promotional things, your business is. No one’s really going to know your business in another five years as opposed to someone who is making these efforts, even if they’re small.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. I think the ROI is hard to measure, but we know that it works and that it’s an over time and that there’s a consistency. I think you mentioned it earlier, is that you may not even realize or remember hearing about them, but your subconscious has and you’ve. It’s been 7, 17 times that you’ve seen their name in a positive light. Okay. Well, now when I need a thing, that company is top of mind. And I think that’s what really resonates.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. For example, if I said accessibility in the WordPress space, which businesses would you think of?

Adam Weeks:
I mean, a person like Amber Hines and what she’s doing with. Yeah, her plugin is. And who she is in her personal brand, I think is a big part of that. Yeah. I think that’s because of the work that she’s done. That’s a good point.

Rae Morey:
Yeah. Yeah. And because someone like Amber is very public about a lot of the work she’s doing and constantly sharing and constantly. Yeah. Putting things out in the newsletter and publishing. So that all builds over time.

Adam Weeks:
And I think one thing that’s important is that Amber does this well. There’s a few people that do this well is that Amber has strong opinions and she disagrees when things aren’t the way that they should be. We know where she stands on topics and that the Internet needs to be more accessible to everybody and she has a clear and consistent message and that there, there’s no ambiguity there of how Amber feels about stuff. And that has served her well.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, absolutely. Agree. Now, I wanted to share a bit of a checklist.

Adam Weeks:
Yes.

Rae Morey:
So we were talking before we started recording, so Adam asked me, is there a bit of a, like pyramid or some kind of, you know, flowchart or something? Tree. Yes. Decision tree. Yes. So to decide if something is news or not. So there are a few points that I thought. So, you know, so this is a little checklist of things. If you’ve got some kind of announcement or news or something you think is news, here’s what I would recommend. So firstly, does your story, does it change how people work, build or engage with WordPress? So the core of this is why should the wider WordPress community care? If you can say yes, then okay, great, it’s a story does it reflect a larger shift in the ecosystem or even a really big shift for your business? If you can say, yep, that’s a story. Would someone outside of your own business care? So, like we talked about earlier, if it’s, you know, a big product update or something, would somebody outside of your business want to know about that? That’s something to think about for a lot of people who send me updates with someone. Are you the first, the or the most unique at something? And that comes back to, you know, what’s happening in AI and a lot of those other kinds of big shifts in WordPress at the moment for businesses, you know, is what you’re doing something that is. Is really cool? Really? Are people going to care? So, yes. Yep, that’s a story. But lastly, what I’d encourage people to ask themselves, you know, can you explain the so what in one sentence without having to add caveats to. Without having to add all these other explanations onto that sentence? So yeah, and I don’t want to sound like a downer. I don’t want to say like, nothing’s news. There’s lots of news. I mean, I’m so busy at the moment. But, you know, and it’s not just for me. It’s for other people who, you know, are publishing podcasts in the WordPress space and other news outlets that are both in WordPress and outside. If they go ahead with your story and it’s not news, then no one’s actually going to listen to it either, and you’re kind of wasting your time. So, you know, you want to make sure that what you’re doing is actually going to engage people.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, we have an attention economy. And if you think about your business of running the repository, you have an obligation to run your business well. And that means that you are going to have stories that people will read and they will actually, you know, we talk about, you know, your newsletter comes out. It’s the one that I read and I read it from the beginning and I skim all the way through. And some stories like, yep, that really engages me. Other stories may not be as relevant and I’ll skim through it, but that’s kind of a natural thing. Is that will this catch people’s attention? Is someone going to care? And I love how you started that. That tree of Is this an inflection point in our industry is kind of another way to think. Will it change how people work? Will it change how they look at using the software? And I think that’s a meaningful shift. Will it change how we interact with the community events are going to have news elements to them because it’s a unique time when we get together in person and what’s happening at these events? I think there’s lots of stories there, but. Yeah. Does anybody care besides you and besides your mom?

Rae Morey:
Wasn’t gonna say? Yeah. And it’s an interesting one, I guess, for you too, you know, working with your business.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
Serious influence, you know, when you’re trying to help businesses promote their products and services, you know, coming back to you, how do I promote this business? You know, in a way that, you know, the wider community is going to want to be interested and know what they’re doing.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah.

Rae Morey:
Finding those stories.

Adam Weeks:
Well, and I think we talked about this briefly a little bit before, but can you plan to have a new story? Can you say, hey, it’s 2025, within the next year, before it turns 2026, is it possible for us to do something newsworthy? What are your thoughts about planning out news?

Rae Morey:
I think you can absolutely do that. Having worked in public relations, I have organized events and initiatives before that we’re able to get local news coverage. It’s about doing it in an intentional way that’s not fake. That’s actually genuinely interesting to people. So a couple of really great examples that I would point out that kind of recent. In the WordPress space we just talked about Amber, I recently covered the accessibility event that Equalize Digital organized for Global. I’m going to muck up the name Global Accessibility Day, I’m going to say. But so they encouraged people to pledge time to commit to addressing accessibility on a website or product or service. So that was great. They got a lot of people signed up, committing. I’m not sure exactly how many hours, but I saw that and I was like, that’s a great story. And Amber also reached out to me and told me what she was doing in advance. And so that allowed me to have some time, you know, because if you tell me the day something’s happening, I’ve probably already got four or five stories that I’m committed to doing at that moment, so I can’t do your product at the last minute. So she got in touch with me the week before or so and said, you know, this is what we’re doing. We’d really appreciate some coverage if you’re able to. And I was like, yep, that’s a great story. Story, let’s do it. And I sent her questions. She got back to me really quickly. So she made it very easy to cover her story. And so that’s an example of coverage she was able to create because it’s not reactive news coverage. She was proactively creating an event that was meaningful for the community and accessibility and brought a lot of the community together to do something good. So there’s that. And then another example that I would share would be Patch Stacks campaign last October where they encouraged their security researchers to I guess, clean up the WordPress plugin repository. So that was quite a big campaign. I can’t remember all the stats off the top of my head. I don’t know how politicians do it, but that was a big campaign that helped remove a lot of vulnerabilities in the directory. And yeah, I guess what I’m saying is a lot of these initiatives are good and they’re contributing back into the community in some ways. So there are ideas for businesses there that, that want to create coverage is just thinking of, I guess, innovative ways to do it. It doesn’t have to be hard, it doesn’t have to be super manufactured, but it could be, you know, thinking about how your business already operates and how could you extend something of what you’re already doing to create some good or to create some change?

Adam Weeks:
Yeah, we’re talking about how oftentimes people start a company to solve a problem. So Amber in this case, she starts a company because she believes in the importance of accessible, making the Internet more accessible or Patch Stack, they’re making the more secure and they obviously have a product that they sell to do that. But there are other ways that they can do that as well. And it can be something as well. I have this plugin that does this thing. Yeah, but you may also believe in the importance of WordPress and can you sponsor someone to a WordCamp? Can you help with getting more young people into the community? Those are things that you are manufacturing, you’re planning ahead of time. And I think the messaging to take away is for help me help you plan. Tell me at least, you know, a week ahead of time or more and be responsive to the questions that I have so that we can see if this is a story. And then, yeah, we’ll get you exposure, we’ll get your name out there and that’ll be great.

Rae Morey:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would love more businesses to give me a heads up and tell me their stories. I’d love to cover more. And not just, I’m not here for the drama, I’m here for all of the stories. Everything that’s happening across the community and not just me. I mean, you know, Nathan Wrigley put out tweets asking for people interested in being on his podcasts. And, you know, I know Matt Madeiras is really keen on digging into the stories in the WordPress space. So there are lots of channels for promotion, but it’s about really thinking on what stories are you putting out there and how do you want people to perceive your business as. Well.

Adam Weeks:
Yeah. All right, so you heard it here, everybody. Rae is looking for you to do better, tell better stories. I’m saying it for you so that you don’t have to.

Rae Morey:
No. There’s so many businesses already doing an amazing job.

Adam Weeks:
That’s what we’re going to talk about on this next podcast. Correct. Where we’re going to give some of those tools of this embargo thing that you’re very passionate about. We’re going to talk about what that might mean.

Rae Morey:
Talk about it way too much. Yeah. So on the next podcast. So I hope everyone enjoyed this episode. So on the next podcast, we’ll look into how to pitch to the media. Not just to me, but to other WordPress media. And also externally, it can be a bit scary. So kind of want to break down, you know, hopefully this. This podcast today, this episode covered and, you know, what the media is looking for. But how do you translate that to outreach and to pitching a story? So, yeah, we’ll cover that next week. So, yeah. All right, Well, I guess that’s a wrap for our first episode together, Adam. Today, you know, we learned all about, you know, what is news versus an update. And I hope listeners enjoy and that I hope this is. I really want these podcasts that we record together to be helpful for people. So hopefully we meet that goal. Yeah. So next time, yes, we’ll be digging into pictures. So, yeah, thank you, Adam, for joining me today. And I’m really looking forward to digging into more topics with you on the next podcast and in future.

Adam Weeks:
Absolutely. All right, join us next time.

Rae Morey:
See ya.