The Washington Post is growing its Arc Publishing business

REUTERS/Stelios Varias

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The Washington Post (WaPo) is looking to boost the number of news outlets that license its "Arc Publishing" content management system (CMS), The Wall Street Journal reports.

Arc is the infrastructure that lets WaPo not only publish content but also build pages, manage paywalls, test headlines, distribute on social channels, and collect and analyze user data. News outlets typically depend on third-party software solutions to power their digital news operations, or build their own platforms and infrastructure in-house. Now, licensing Arc gives them the ability to use the same sophisticated CMS platform as WaPo. 

WaPo currently licenses Arc to eight university newspapers and 11 outside news operations, including Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Tampa Bay Times, and Paraguay’s La Nación. WaPo also reportedly has a preliminary deal in place with Tronc Inc. (formerly Tribune Publishing Co.) to potentially bring Arc to publications like the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. This business could become $100 million a year revenue stream eventually, according to WaPo's chief information officer Shailesh Prakash. 

WaPo's focus on licensing its CMS underscores several emerging trends in the publishing world. 

• Finding growth on the tech side of business. Since acquiring WaPo in 2013, Jeff Bezos has brought a tech focus to the company to help it embrace the next generation of media and technology. The engineering team has tripled in the last three years, according to Business Insider, and the affiliation with Amazon has made it possible for the company to recruit engineers to rival teams in Silicon Valley. This team is dedicated to the development and maintenance of Arc, and to help onboard partners who use the publishing platform. 
• Platform-licensing as a new competitive space for publishers. A number of digital news outlets have been begun licensing their CMS platforms to third-party outlets. In April, Medium launched a bundle of new tools that help publishers post and monetize their content to the web. Meanwhile, Vox Media licenses its “Chorus for Advertisers” CMS to marketers for producing branded content. Gawker was also a pioneer in this space, and aimed to be one of the premiere CMS-licensor's with its Kinja platform, but its recent financial troubles have hampered these plans.

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