The Washington Post today announces its Arc custom publishing platform now powers the website of Willamette Week, a news organization that covers politics and culture in Portland, Oregon. This is the first licensing client for The Post’s software-as-a-service arm, which was announced a year ago when it began experimenting with this new business by supporting the web infrastructure of student newspapers at Columbia, Yale and the University of Maryland.
“At The Post, we believe that news and technology go hand-in-hand. This belief is reflected in Arc which prioritizes speed, design and technology with strong content to ensure publishers have the tools to offer a state-of-the-art reading experience,” said Shailesh Prakash, CIO of The Washington Post. “Willamette Week’s redesign is a great example of how a strong framework can bring dynamic features to readers.”
Willamette Week’s site has been rebuilt onto the Arc platform and is now running on PageBuilder, the sophisticated site layout engine which The Post itself is currently using. PageBuilder will enable Willamette Week to serve online traffic at scale with minimal load time and give their staff access to rich, customizable templates and pages. Willamette Week’s staff will also utilize WebSked, Arc’s tool for internal newsroom planning.
Willamette Week, which also prints 70,000 copies each week, covers one of the country’s fastest-growing metro areas in addition to reporting on news and events in one of the world’s most revered wine regions. In 2005, Willamette Week became the only weekly newspaper to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and it was the first paper to win for a story that published online before running in print.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with The Post and honored to be the first news organization to work with them” said Web Editor Lizzy Acker. “The ease of use, the flexibility of design and the knowledge of The Post’s team has been nothing short of remarkable.”
About Arc: Arc is a powerful suite of publishing tools custom built for the modern newsroom by engineers at The Washington Post. Each of the tools work seamlessly together and can function individually, based on a newsroom’s needs. Each tool in Arc has a team of dedicated engineers devoted to advancing the product and responding to changes in the digital news landscape as quickly as possible. Learn More.
