The New Yorker website was not looking healthy this morning:

However, it wasn’t that bad for everyone:

And that triggered a little bell in my memory. A few days back, I saw, via Matt Mullenweg, that the New Yorker is rebuilding its website:

The new site, designed to be cleaner, with new typefaces, will be based on the WordPress publishing system. It is expected to be easier to navigate for mobile users — among the fastest-growing segments of the readership.

I was told for years by publishing company IT people that blog CMSes would never be good enough to run serious sites. In the meantime, they kept adding more and more technology costs into the business, for less and less gain. Big IT projects have an awful lot to answer for in the current debate about the viability of online journalism.

Also noted: Variety, a title sold by RBI a few years ago, is now running on WordPress:

Right now, your operation needs a really good reason for NOT running on a cost-effective, cheap, and rapidly developed CMS like WordPress. And yet, the custom, bespoke magazine/newspaper CMS still reigns supreme.

UPDATE: In the time it’s taken to write this post, the site is live.