Luke Fretwell is one of the most creative and pioneering people I've met in open source. He's enjoyed a 25+ year career that has covered multiple projects, collaborations, and businesses. The through-line for all Luke's projects has been making government better through technology. Luke created GovPress, a very popular WordPress theme focused for governments. He built Proud City, a WordPress-based SaaS service for government. His latest work includes ScanGov to track the quality of government we...
Jul 06, 2025•57 min•Ep. 19
Carol Cavaleiro lives in Brazil and supports journalists across North and South America through her work at Indiegraf. In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Carol discusses her journey from co-founding the fact-checking agency AusFatos in Brazil to becoming a product director at Indiegraf, a Canadian publishing platform. We talk about misinformation, and the importance of community journalism to get genuine information to people. Carol and her clients need to use innovative ways to reach ...
Jun 23, 2025•50 min•Ep. 18
Jacob Donnelly is the founder of A Media Operator (AMO) Over the last five year, he's grown AMO from a newsletter to a fully-fledged media organization. Soon after launching, Jacob moved from Substack to WordPress with the goal of owning his platform and audience. Jacob and AMO have covered huge changes in the publishing industry over the last few years, and his insights will be fascinating for WordPress publishers. On this episode of the PublishPress Podcast we talk about subscription-based bus...
Jun 11, 2025•53 min•Ep. 17
In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, we interview Pete Ericson, the founder of Leaky Paywall. He has many years of experience building paywalls for publishers. Pete says that publishers are still nervous about paywalls, but increasingly see how valuable they can be. We talk a lot about the importance of newsletters in building audience engagement. Once you have the customer's email address, then you can start building a real relationship with them. The conversation also delves into the i...
May 19, 2025•50 min•Ep. 16
Matt Hoy is the Chief Revenue Officer of Revcontent which provides native advertising for publishers. In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Matt talks about how publishers can drive revenue despite the challenges posed by changes in Google search and the rise of AI. Matt believes the key to success is trust. The advertising landscape is shifting away from low-quality ads. There needs to be trust between publishers, advertisers, platforms, and visitors. We dive into Revcontent's partnershi...
May 12, 2025•46 min•Ep. 15
Ben May runs The Code Company, one of the most successful WordPress agencies in Australia. In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, we discuss Ben's journey in the Australian publishing industry, the evolution of WordPress, and the importance of community engagement. Ben has tons of experience with scaling WordPress sites, particularly with comment and community systems. He believes we're seeing a shift from social media to owning community interactions. Ben's agency: https://thecode.co Time...
Apr 30, 2025•50 min•Ep. 14
In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, we talk with Andrew Wilder from NerdPress. His team specializes in WordPress support and maintenance for independent publishers, particularly in the food and travel blogging niches. Because he works with very high-traffic websites, Andrew and his team do things differently. For example, their plugin updates are always done manually, with very careful roll-outs that can take a week or more. They also spend a lot of time testing and optimizing for site ...
Apr 22, 2025•45 min•Ep. 13
Jen Kramer has taught web design for decades. Her career spans Harvard, community colleges, LinkedIn, Frontend Masters and now Annie Cannons, a nonprofit boot camp for human trafficking survivors. In this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Jen talks about her career and how web design teaching has changes over the years. Jen believes that good teaching requires the same skills, no matter where the students are. Jen believes that students need to know the foundational skills in web development:...
Apr 16, 2025•48 min•Ep. 12
Kyle Van Deusen runs the popular The Admin Bar community, a platform for WordPress agency owners and freelancers. He's been able to grow the community to over 12,000 people because he's still an agency owner and is constantly dealing with the same problems as his members. Find out more: - https://theadminbar.com - https://www.facebook.com/groups/theadminbar/ Kyle talks about community management and the unique culture he has developed at the Admin Bar. We discuss strategies for content creation ...
Apr 08, 2025•41 min•Ep. 11
Colin Devroe has been a blogger since the 1990's. He currently runs Hubbub, a social sharing and website growth plugin for WordPress. He is passionate about helping bloggers succeed. And in 2025, that means owning your audience. On this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Colin shares his vast experience in the blogging industry. He talks about how social networks are swinging back towards with human curation with bloggers seeing a lot of success on platforms like Flipboard. And to really own y...
Mar 24, 2025•48 min•Ep. 10
Brad Williams is the CEO and Co-Founder of WebDevStudios, a leading WordPress agency. He's been involved in some ground-breaking projects, such as moving Microsoft's blog networks from closed-source code to WordPress. Microsoft's adoption of WordPress really helped validate the platform for enterprises. On this episode of the PublishPress Podcast, Brad discusses how his team have moved publishers to the block editor using a step-by-step approach rather than a rebuild. Surprisingly for me, he als...
Mar 19, 2025•53 min•Ep. 9
Tyler Channel runs PaywallProject which is a WordPress stack for news publishers. Tyler recommends that the publishers use a paywall to drive revenue, no matter how small or regional their audience is. When he was in college, Tyler heard a professor say that someone needs to discover a way to make newspapers sustainable. That's been his goal for years, and now he's making it happen. Find out more: https://www.paywallproject.com/ Links mentioned in this episode: https://leakypaywall.com https://n...
Mar 11, 2025•46 min•Ep. 8
Matt Medeiros is a foundational member of WordPress community, as a journalist and a podcaster. He believes that community is far more valuable than large number of newsletter and social media followers. Matt believes deeply in community, and also curiosity. It's fascinating to hear about his journey and how his curiosity as led him from project to project. At the end of the conversation, we hear where his curiosity is leading him now. Matt runs The WP Minute and Slack community: https://thewpmi...
Mar 03, 2025•47 min•Ep. 7
Brian Morrissey is a veteran of the media industry after long stints at DigiDay, Adweek. He is full of interesting opinions about where the industry is going. He thinks that smaller is better for publishers. He believes that relationships are often far more valuable than large number of newsletter and social media followers. And scarily for WordPress users, Brian says we may not even need a website in years to come. Brian runs The Rebooting newsletter and in this episode of the PublishPress podc...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 6
Rae Morey launched "The Repository" in 2019. It's a weekly newsletter that often break real news about what's happening in the WordPress ecosystem. Sign up for Rae's newsletter at https://www.therepository.email . Here are some of the topic we covered: Each weekly issue has about 5 major stories, with lots of community comments, plus a couple of dozen other stories. How does Rae collect and sift through all the noise to find the key stories? How does The Repository earn revenue? The newsletter i...
Feb 10, 2025•39 min•Ep. 5
Chris Hardie is a software engineer with a deep interest in journalism. Chris worked for Automattic for five years and recently completed a master's degree in journalism. In 2022, Chris combined these two passions by acquiring Western Wayne News in Wayne County, Indiana. The paper has a WordPress site and a weekly printed edition. It covers the spectrum of local news, including events, sports, government meetings, and business. This episode features Steve Burge from PublishPress and Dan Knauss f...
Jan 14, 2025•49 min•Ep. 4
Andy Dehnart has run the Reality Blurred website for 25 years now. He writes about reality TV and now also about true crime TV shows. Andy talks about his career as an independent reviewer, and how small publishers can still thrive in 2025. This episode features Steve Burge from PublishPress and Dan Knauss from Multidots. Here are some topics we covered: It has been fascinating to hear Andy talk about Reality TV as a reflection of society. Why is reality TV so endlessly fascinating? What is the ...
Jan 13, 2025•40 min•Ep. 3
Josh Koenig is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pantheon. When I scheduled this interview, I thought Josh was launching a tool called "Content Publishers" to connect Google Docs to WordPress. Given Josh's achievements, I should have known better. Josh's goals with this product are far bigger and more interesting. We cover these topics and more: An introduction to Pantheon's Content Publisher. The pain points they’re aiming to solve. Are publishers are addicted to Google Docs in their...
Jan 12, 2025•44 min•Ep. 2
Seth is the Lead Engineer at the Pew Research Center. He's been an early adopter of using Gutenberg in WordPress. He's often on the cutting edge of many of the coolest Gutenberg features. In this episode we dive into how Gutenberg is driving innovation throughout the Pew organization. We cover these topics and more: What is the Pew Research Center? How does it help publishers? What is about blocks that meet the needs of Pew authors? A phrase stuck out at me from your WordCamp US presentation. Yo...
Jan 09, 2025•26 min•Ep. 1
