How The Washington Post built Arc, its suite of digital publishing tools, and started offering the software to other newsrooms as a paid service
The newspaper created a platform to tackle its own challenges. Then, with Amazon-like spirit, it realized there was a business in helping other publishers do the same. Facebook: Serm Teck Choon . Tweets: @trengriffin and @sub8u . Thanks: @lisajaycox See also Mediagazer Facebook: Serm Teck Choon : Media companies have to transform themselves into technology company. Tweets: Tren Griffin / @trengriffin : Washington Post is selling SaaS to other publishers (trying to be an aggregator - the Valve/Steam of publishing). http://www.fastcompany.com/... Subrahmanyam KVJ / @sub8u : Every company will soon be a tech company. Or will be overtaken by a company in their industry that better understands tech. http://www.fastcompany.com/... http://twitter.com/... Thanks: @lisajaycox See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The Post had floated this move years earlier: a December 2014 report described its plan to generate revenue by licensing its content management system to other news organizations. This 2017 feature marks the shift from experiment to product — Arc, built to solve the paper's own publishing problems, is now a paid service for outside newsrooms, with commentators framing it as an AWS-style play and even 'the Valve/Steam of publishing.'
What came after validates the thesis: by 2022 Arc XP was licensed to 2,000+ companies, up from roughly 1,500 a year prior, and later that year the Post was reportedly exploring a spinoff or sale of the unit. The counterpoint in the same era is the New York Times, which kept its digital transformation in-house rather than selling it.
First-order effects
- Other newsrooms gain access to the same publishing stack the Post built for itself, turning an internal cost center into a revenue line alongside subscriptions and advertising.
- The Post now competes for publisher technology budgets against vendors whose core business is software, not journalism.
Second-order effects
- Publishers face a build-versus-buy decision: the Times' route of developing proprietary tools internally stands against renting the Post's stack, splitting the market between infrastructure owners and renters.
- If Arc scales as a subscription and ad-network layer — the expansion the Post outlined in 2018 — it starts capturing infrastructure economics from the very industry it reports on.
Third-order effects
- News organizations bifurcate into platforms and tenants: a handful convert newsroom engineering into SaaS businesses sold back to peers, while the rest outsource their publishing infrastructure.
- That structure echoes the cloud pattern — one player's operational necessity becomes the industry's utility — raising the question of whether critical publisher tooling should sit inside a competitor newsroom at all.
The trend: Media companies are converting internal engineering into SaaS businesses sold back to their own industry, following the AWS playbook from operator to vendor.