having worked on supporting a content management system in a media company, i am sad to inform that in my experience, these systems are wildly mismanaged by a C-suite with no understanding of what it takes to make them work well.
so of course they are hemorrhaging money
So, skimming the article there's only a brief mention of "Arc XP" but it looks like the WaPo spent hundreds of millions playing software developer? Creating a content management system that they'd use and license to other companies?
That sounds completely crazy to me.
Maybe my complete outsider perspective fails to grasp key points (the scale of a CMS, the cost of licensing one, how bad existing CMS options were) but I cannot at all understand this.
Timothy noted that btw. It makes sense they're trying to follow NYT in diversifying from just news (Food, games, their broadcasting deals with TV and radio)
We bought an expensive system that we didn't fully understand, for terms we didn't realize we're financially ruinous, so we're going to have to make some cuts to payroll...
