Publishing Tech round-up: the News Project and the Coral Project

The News Project

The News Project is a new venture headed up by Merrill Brown to create a full-service news tech platform. The AP are involved, allowing users of the new platform access to its wire. VC backed. Using 10up to build its platform and Piano for their paywall tech. [axios]

Obvious questions: if the tech is being developed by an outside company, and the paywalls is from an outside company - what is this VC-backed organisation actually bringing to the table?

Vox Media acquires The Coral Project

Vox has made no secret of its ambitions to develop an additional revenue flow by licensing its CMS, Chorus, and this acquisition make a lot of sense.

The Coral Project is an attempt to improve the quality of online discussions, that's been incubated by the Mozilla Foundation since 2015. Its Talk product is used by over 40 publishers across the world, and will now be integrated into Chorus, and available as a stand-alone product.

We've seen a real and quite large-scale return to focus on on-site community and owned engagement since the Facepocalyopse. It's encouraging to see one of the big new CMS vendors putting its money where its mouth is on this one. See you in the comments section…