AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Two leading non-profit news organizations, The Bay Citizen and The Texas Tribune, announced today the launch of a free, open source publishing platform that will help other news organizations more easily engage with readers, manage content and raise revenue, thanks to a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Texas Tribune in Austin and The Bay Citizen in San Francisco, both non-profit online journalism organizations covering regional civic news, are jointly sharing the $975,000 grant that was announced March 2011 at SXSW Interactive.

Over the past year, dozens of local online news organizations were launched.  Many of these organizations have shared their struggles in finding a publishing platform that is both low-cost to implement and flexible enough to allow innovation in content delivery and audience engagement, as well as providing support capabilities for revenue generation.

The Bay Citizen and The Texas Tribune, both known for quality journalism and strong investment in technology, were passionate about working together to develop an open-source software platform that frees journalistic organizations from having to spend ever-increasing amounts of money on technology (www.armstrongcms.org). Armstrong helps start up organizations by providing them with a platform that contains the large amount of common functionality that most news sites share, with the flexibility to allow them to easily customize functions of their choosing to differentiate their publishing experience.

To date, Chicago News Cooperative, Crosscut.com and Digitell.ch have signed on to use the publishing platform and have joined the Armstrong community. The Daily Dot, the hometown paper of the World Wide Web, launched the first fully Armstrong-powered site in August 2011, less than three months after Armstrong began development.

"We are excited about this collaboration between two emerging news orgs and hope that publishers big and small will see Armstrong as a useful publishing platform," said John Bracken, Journalism and Media Innovation program director for Knight Foundation.

Brian Kelley, CTO at The Bay Citizen says, "It has been amazing to see Armstrong emerge as an ecosystem and not just a technology. The Armstrong community is now made up of integration partners, publishers and developers around the world contributing to a common project."

"We are ecstatic that literally hundreds of media companies around the globe have expressed interest in moving to Armstrong and more importantly, that they understand that Armstrong is far more than just a CMS," says Higinio Maycotte, CTO of The Texas Tribune. "These organizations have real business needs and Armstrong is engineered to integrate seamlessly into the revenue generating areas of the organization."

The Armstrong open-source publishing platform targets the needs of newsrooms with:

• Editorial workflow integration
• A multi-media library of text, images and video
• Search engine optimization that improves the way articles are linked, aggregated and tagged
• A straightforward migration path from widely used publishing systems, such as WordPress, and examples to aid in migrating from other systems
• Integration points for connecting the Armstrong platform with a CRM system

Next steps for Armstrong include improvements to the platform to make it even easier for editors and reporters interact with the system, and rich options for distributing content to mobile devices out of the box. The Armstrong community will also continue to seek new technology partnerships to enhance and power the platform. To find out more about how to participate or become a partner, please contact:

Brian Kelley, Bay Citizen CTO; bkelley@baycitizen.org
Higinio Maycotte, Texas Tribune Founding CTO; hmaycotte@texastribune.org

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

About The Bay Citizen

The Bay Citizen is a nonprofit, nonpartisan member-supported news organization that provides in-depth original reporting on Bay Area issues including public policy, education, the arts and cultural affairs, health and science, the environment, and more.  The Bay Citizen's news can be found online at www.baycitizen.org as well as in print in The New York Times Bay Area report on Fridays and Sundays. For more information, please visit www.baycitizen.org.

About The Texas Tribune

The Texas Tribune is a non-profit, nonpartisan public media organization whose mission is to promote civic engagement and discourse on the public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide interest. Based in the Texas capital, the Tribune won two national Edward R. Murrow awards and a General Excellence award from the Online News Association in its first year. For more, visit www.texastribune.org.

Contacts:
The Bay Citizen, Keith Meyer, VP Marketing, kmeyer@baycitizen.org 415-852-5100

The Texas Tribune, Elaine Garza, egarza@giantnoise.com 512-382-9017

SOURCE The Bay Citizen

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