Ask the editor of a local magazine what the publication runs on and you will usually get a list rather than an answer. A content management system for the stories. A separate tool for events. A mailing list somewhere else. A directory subscription. An ad network that takes a cut. And a developer on retainer whose real job is keeping the seams from showing.
None of those tools is bad on its own. The problem is that one business is running on six systems that do not know about each other. We know this because we publish two titles ourselves, and for a long time we ran them the same way. This piece is about why we stopped, and what we built instead.
The usual stack, and what it costs
Here is the shape almost every publication we looked at had in common.
The website. Built by somebody, once, on a platform chosen for the website rather than for the business behind it.
The newsletter. A second list, kept in a second tool, which is never quite the same list as the people who read the site or come to the events.
The events calendar. Another vendor, another login, and another place a reader has to be a stranger.
The directory. Often a subscription of its own, and often out of date.
The ad inventory. Usually not really yours. An exchange fills it, reports on it, and keeps a share of what it earns.
The apps. If there are any, frequently a template with a logo on it, reading the site through a wrapper.
Six bills and six logins is the visible cost. The real cost is that a reader who subscribes to the newsletter, comments on a story, and books a seat at an event is three different strangers in three different databases. Nobody can see that person whole, so nobody can serve them well, and every attempt to connect the pieces becomes somebody’s project.
Why we wrote our own
We publish Long Island Wave, our regional title for Nassau and Suffolk, read by more than 40,000 people a month. We also publish Creations Magazine, the holistic living magazine for New York City and Long Island, now in its fourth decade and read by more than 80,000 people a month in print and online.
Two titles, different audiences, the same needs. Both needed a newsroom, an events calendar, a directory, a relationship with their readers, their own advertisers, and apps. Renting six tools twice was the obvious move. We had an engineering team that already built software for clients, so we took the harder road and wrote one system instead.
That system is Wave Publisher. Both of our titles publish on it every day, ad inventory included. It turned out other publications need the same thing, which is why it is now something we license.
What one system looks like
Every module below is live on Long Island Wave or Creations Magazine today. Nothing here is a roadmap.
Newsroom. Stories with categories, a featured hero, share cards, and a Google News sitemap, published in a minute. Drafts, editors, and a schedule, with the structured data and the search engine pings handled for you.
Print issues. For a title with a print edition, the whole back catalog online, issue by issue, and each new edition the day it drops.
Events and directory. A community calendar readers submit to, a resource directory, and a marketplace, all ready to sell as upgrades.
Readers and newsletters. Passwordless accounts, comments, moderated discussion circles, and a list that grows on its own.
Wave Ads. Your own inventory and your own advertisers, with rotation, targeting, and first-party reporting. No exchange taking a cut.
Apps and push. Your title in the App Store and Google Play, with breaking news alerts you send yourself.
The point is not the length of the list. It is that every item on it reads and writes the same data. When an editor publishes a story, it is on the web and in both apps at once. A reader is one person in one database, whichever door they came in through.
The ad question deserves its own section
For most local publications, advertising is the business. It is also the part most often handed to someone else.
We did not bolt an exchange onto our titles. We wrote the ad server, and it ships inside the platform. Placements are filled at request time, so the server reads the slot, pulls the advertisers eligible for it, and rotates between them. Each placement declares the shape of creative it accepts, so a wide banner is never squeezed into a square. Impressions and clicks are counted by your own server as they happen, not by a pixel an ad blocker can drop.
Nothing is pooled. Your advertisers, your creative, and your reporting stay with your title, and nobody sits between you and the readers you spent years earning. When our titles launched their apps, sponsored placements in the apps ran on the same system as the websites, so an advertiser reaches both with one campaign and one report.
What to ask of any platform
Whether or not you ever talk to us, these are the questions we would put to anything a publication is thinking of running on.
Is a reader one record? If the newsletter, the comments, and the events each keep their own list, you will spend your life reconciling them.
Do you own your inventory? Your rates, your advertisers, and your numbers, counted at the source.
Can your archive come with you? We have migrated twice: Creations came across with four decades of issues and Long Island Wave with hundreds of articles, old URLs redirected so nothing that ranked was thrown away.
Who owns the content and the list? It should be you, and you should keep both if you ever leave.
Is somebody running it? A platform is not a handover. It needs a team shipping updates and watching it.
Where to go from here
Wave Publisher is built for anything with an audience and an editorial calendar: magazines, local news, trade titles, and association magazines. The full list of modules, and a live look at Long Island Wave running on it, is on the Wave Publisher page. If you want to see your title on the platform we use every day, book a call and we will walk you through it from the inside, including the parts we would do differently.
