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We talk with people interested in WordPress publishing. You'll hear interview with publishers who happen to be using WordPress, and also people in the WordPress space.
Hey, and welcome to the PublishPress Podcast. I'm Steve Burge from PublishPress , and we make publishing plugins for WordPress.
Dan Knauss:I'm Dan Knauss from Multidots, an enterprise WordPress agency that works with media publishers and then really all kinds of publishers, people using WordPress at at a large scale enterprise level. And we may use plugins like PublishPress to help them do their work.
Steve Burge:So we are talking with Carol Cavallero today. She works with IndieGraph, which is a WordPress based publishing platform based in Canada. And they basically have a version of WordPress, which is optimized for publishers. They offer newsletters, ads, subscription revenue tools, experts as well to talk to. Basically, everything that a a small newspaper publisher needs to get online.
Steve Burge:She's based in Brazil of all places and has well, Dan, she has an interesting story about how she got started and how she ended up working for IndieGraph. Right?
Dan Knauss:Very interesting. Yeah. Carol was kind of on the front lines very early of internet disinformation analysis and building the radar to even pre AI working with linguists and journalists and others to kind of programmatically identify misinformation, where it was coming from, and helping other journalists and their news consumers, get good source material and avoid the bad, that really has evolved and I I sounds like escalated since then.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Carol was a really fascinating person to talk with, and I think you guys listening are really gonna enjoy this episode. Hey, Carol. Thank you so much for joining us on the Published Press Podcast.
Steve Burge:Good to meet you.
Carol Cavaleiro:Nice meeting you too.
Steve Burge:Hey. Do you mind introducing yourself? You work for Indigraph, which is based up in Canada, but you live from Brazil. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Exactly. So I'm based in in Rio, the best city, in my opinion, in South America. It's often very sunny, very beautiful. I am a product director at Indigraph, which is a Canadian company.
Carol Cavaleiro:We deploy tech. So our publishers, our small publishers, can reach sustainability using our own platform, using our tech tools. Before joining IndiGraph, before being a product director, I cofounded a fact checking agency here in Brazil called Altuatos. And before that, I've worked in the biggest media outlets in Brazil. So I just I my background is in graphic design, so I was a major has rep has a graphic designer.
Carol Cavaleiro:And I've worked as an infographic designer in several media outlets in Brazil. So I think I I can combine a lot of knowledge of working with journalists, at the same time, lot of passion working with independent media. Yeah. I think that's Can
Steve Burge:you tell us the Ausfatos story? Oh, let let's start with what it means. What what's the English translation of Ausfatos?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. It'll be something like to the facts. We've yeah. We founded Ausfatos in 02/2015. Everything was pretty different back then.
Carol Cavaleiro:There wasn't any fact checking agency here in Brazil. I think in US, we had, like, political or quality fact. But in Brazil, we had no fact checking agency. And we were three people. So it was a journalist, a developer, and me, a designer.
Carol Cavaleiro:And when we co founded Alsatos, the nature of work was kind of different. So the the whole point was kind of uncover the truth behind this political claim. So we were fact checking politicians. Right? Like, quotes from politicians.
Carol Cavaleiro:From 02/2015, we had an impeachment in 02/2016. After that, we had elections. And then after that, we have, like, a a a very big change on the social media landscape and how people interacted and how, like, this how the misinterventions started traveling across social media?
Steve Burge:In 02/2015, looking back ten years later, very much seems like a an inflection point, a time when things changed when I mean, if you think back 2015, WhatsApp didn't really exist. Tube didn't have anything like the cultural significance it has now. Didn't really we really hadn't really had any of those big online misinformation scandals. But a year later, 2016 I mean, 2015 when you started was a turning point. Right?
Dan Knauss:Twitter.
Steve Burge:Yes. Yeah. Twitter too.
Carol Cavaleiro:It was a really good timing. And and again, like, that's when we start seeing people talk about fact checking here in Brazil. Like, this become like a a common thing. People knowing what fact checking is, recognizing the value of it. And I think as time passed, it only reinforced the need of the fact checking work.
Carol Cavaleiro:Right? So it never got it never got better. It only got, like, more challenging. It only got, like, yeah, more work, more unexpected twists. And yeah.
Steve Burge:Oh, so what how long how long did you end up running Alice Vatos for? What was the the life story of that product?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. So Alice Vatos is still is still exist. So I was working part time when we we co founded. I was working mostly as a designer because that's my my background. But in 2019 yeah.
Carol Cavaleiro:I think it was 02/2019, just before COVID hit, I moved full time to Ausfatos to lead a massive project there. It was super cool. I I really loved, doing, this project. It's called Hadar Auswatos. So I was working as a designer, but also leading this multidisciplinary team of developers, data journalists, and linguists.
Carol Cavaleiro:And our goal, our purpose was to identify these misinformation patterns over social media, misinformation waves, how it was formed, how it was spread, how it it bursts the bubble and reach people that were not their primary consumers of this piece of information.
Steve Burge:So people who are maybe not reading it with subtitles may miss that the the name of this new product in English would be like RADAR. RADAR. Yep. D a r. Yeah.
Steve Burge:So this is a kind of a kind of a searching and seeking to understand okay. What is the exact phrase for, like, kind of a like a radar, basically. That's the word for it. A radar searching for misinformation online, looking for patterns, looking for trends, looking for sources, perhaps?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Like, I'm monitoring to right? Like, we didn't we were scraping social media. And from this content that we were scraping, we were kind of trying to rate it between okay content to potentially music formative. So it was just like a scraping mechanism that was scraping, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, several WhatsApp channels as well.
Carol Cavaleiro:And it was so big that there there was, like in the peak of our scraping, we were scraping around 9,000 content weekly. And then we created this algorithm that was rating this content. And then it was because there wasn't, like it wasn't verified by humans, you couldn't say, like, that this content is disinformative. So you could say that this is potentially disinformative based on these key indicators that we mapped and we thought it's common among this kind of messages. It was really cool because it was really challenging.
Dan Knauss:Who's the audience for that? Was that people just general public reading news, you know, people who wanna find accurate information would come to that, or did other news organizations use it too?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. So it's primary to feed journalists with data. Our newsroom took a lot of benefit from it. We created over, I think, over a 100 articles using this dataset so we could could clearly spot the misinformation waves for when when it started, how it's how it formed, and the big spreaders of this specific misinformation. So the the main, user for this was, like, other journalists, researchers, people that are trying to understand what is the what how misinformation forms and what the effect that it causes.
Dan Knauss:Right? Yeah.
Steve Burge:Did that become more difficult over time?
Carol Cavaleiro:Well, it was very challenging at first because so the landscape that we had in 02/2019. Because at the end of 02/2019, we had elections. The biggest topic that we had in May took over in 2020 was, the city elections that will happen after. And then we were This was the pandemic.
Steve Burge:This was the city elections in Rio?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was Brazil.
Carol Cavaleiro:So it was a lot of it's a lot of work because it's a lot of cities. When we elect mayor, we also elect, I think, parts of the congress as well. So we have, like, this it's a big election. But it's how do I say this? It's harder to identify the things that you want to cover because it's, like, it's decentralized.
Carol Cavaleiro:So, basically, each city center has its own topic in mind. Usually, you go from, like, health, education, security. But in some areas, there are some topics that are more that gain more attention over time. So that by itself was really challenging. But when COVID hit, then we had to pivot.
Carol Cavaleiro:Right? Like, there is no way for us to cover elections. There's maybe like, there's no point of that anymore because we were handling with a very, like, unexpected, uncertain uncertain topic new topic that is not COVID. And it was very challenging because a lot of people asked me asked me this when we were building Hadar. Like, did you use AI?
Carol Cavaleiro:Like, how how could I use AI? COVID, it was such a new thing. There wasn't, like, enough data points for us to feed anything, for us to train anything. So it was basically starting from the beginning, trying to understand what misinformation related to the pandemic is, actually, and starting mapping those points out. So, yeah, it was very challenging because we had to pivot.
Carol Cavaleiro:We have to and start from scratch. We start without any dataset. Like, Ausfatos, since it started in 02/2015, we used to have a lot of articles about previous elections. Right? So that would be our starting point before.
Carol Cavaleiro:But with COVID, we had nothing. So we had to monitor and have to build this dataset as things were were happening. And it was definitely very interesting. I learned I learned a lot from it. And I'm really passionate about Hadar because it was, like, kind of my first product.
Carol Cavaleiro:So the first thing that I engaged in, and there is, like, this product perspective. And, like, there was a clear objective, like, a clear beginning, a clear ending as well.
Steve Burge:Yeah. With the ending, was it was it related to some of the social media companies becoming less willing to share their data to give access to researchers?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. So during the the pandemic, I thought we we were able to see that a lot of there were these social media platforms were kind of engaging with the data, so it was okay to just just feed us data. Right? They they kind of wanted that because there was, like, this whole perception, this global issue that people need this data to study. People needed to find misinformation because it became a public health crisis.
Carol Cavaleiro:After COVID and after yeah. I think things dramatically changed as well. Right? Like, I think in 2023 or 2024 maybe, Meta killed Carl Tingle. Yeah.
Carol Cavaleiro:That was, like, very comfortable.
Dan Knauss:'23. Yeah. In Australia Australia and Canada, I think, and maybe maybe others were were affected. For Canada, it was August 2023, the federal government Yeah. Had the online news act where they were and, yeah, and I believe Australia had similar thing where the they said, like, if you're going to just take our our country's news media, you need to pay or work out a deal with them.
Dan Knauss:And instead, Meta said, no news from Canada. No news from Australia or whoever else was in a similar situation. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. But but if used it they used it as a triggered because these programs ended across like, ended in Brazil as well. Not only CrowdTagle, but any funding that they had around third party fact checkings. So they just decided to kill everything. Uh-huh.
Carol Cavaleiro:So we lost all data access and then we lost also funding. Right? Because we used to have a lot of like we were part of this program called third party fact checking. And then Twitter became X and also cut all of our access. So, yeah, think I think Ringdair shows clearly that, like, a willingness of this big tech to support, to provide resources, to provide data, to provide, researches, materials, and then taking all that back after the COVID ended, if it ever ended.
Carol Cavaleiro:But it's hard for me to say, like, when COVID ended as well, because I think everything
Dan Knauss:Right.
Carol Cavaleiro:Became so different after that. Right?
Steve Burge:So how how did you make the the leap from being a the lead of a fact check organization in Brazil to working for a a WordPress based publishing platform in Canada? What was the the spark that led you to make that change?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. So with Hadar, it was my first product, and I realized that's what I really like doing. Like, I really like learning new things. I really like new challenges, but I really like working with people with different backgrounds as well. So in that radar, I wish to work with journalists, but also developers, but also linguists, which is very not common for any newsrooms.
Carol Cavaleiro:And then I did this course that is from NEPA, News Product Alliance. And then I understood that what I was doing was product. And basically, I said that I want to build more products. And that's how I knew IndieGraph. I felt like IndieGraph was very special right from the beginning, right when first read about them, because their whole goal, their whole objective is just like making news more democratic.
Carol Cavaleiro:Right? And I think, and I truly believe in that. Like, I do feel that we strength, that we make democracy stronger stronger as we have more voices out there. And in Brazil, of course, having the knowledge that I have, knowing that we live in a very deep, desert. I think half of the cities in Brazil, they don't have any particular newsroom covering anything that happens there.
Carol Cavaleiro:So it's pretty dramatic. It's and I I know that US and Canada has also news deserts, but it's a very different number, And I truly believe in that. So when I saw this spot open, I was like, well, think IndiGraphic can combine all my skills and can create something cool and something that I really believe.
Steve Burge:So you're basically building a a product at IndiGraph that combines the WordPress platform, the the WordPress core, plus also some revenue tools to allow Disorder, I believe. Your customers to bring in money from Yeah.
Dan Knauss:Absolutely. Advertising. Yeah.
Steve Burge:Plus Yeah. Okay. Advertising platform as well. Plus, I think that you have some experts. Basically, you're you're trying to package a lot of things that publishers need to succeed.
Steve Burge:Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Exactly. So IntiGraph is pretty new. IntiGraph was founded in 2020 by Erin Miller Miller and Caitlin Havelock. They're sisters.
Carol Cavaleiro:They used to work at this course. And the whole thing around the this course is that it is community funded and it really break broke even. So they achieved sustainability. And, they decided that it was important to share their learnings with with more publishers. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Like, share what they learned around when working at the discourse. So they founded IndieGraph in 02/2020. It started as a tech company. It is still a tech company. The goal is democratizing the tech tools across all of our publishers, and my particular goal is to make sure that these products are so easy that anybody can use it.
Carol Cavaleiro:Right? So we just don't want tech savvy journalists to want anybody to find it easy to use.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. How do you make that flexible for very different environments? Like, you've mentioned with with Brazil where there might be a lower literacy and everyone's got phones, but they're not maybe not a lot you know, a laptop that would be less common. Maybe the the connection, the speed is is different in different places. Is how do you accommodate those kind of differences that maybe would be very different from an indie graph consumer in North America versus South America?
Dan Knauss:I
Carol Cavaleiro:think we definitely have a lot of room for improvement as we are joining Latin America. But I think we started in a really good shape already. So the reason why we use WordPress, for instance, we use WordPress because it is so popular. Right? Like, a lot of people had had a WordPress website
Steve Burge:before. Already know it.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. They already know. They are familiar. They know how to use blogs. They know how to create a new post.
Carol Cavaleiro:At the same time, this can also be a problem because it's so flexible to a point that you can add tens of thousands of plugins, and then you break your website. It turns out to be, like, really slow, etcetera. So we took, like, a a a very standardized approach to that. So, yeah, we are taking advantage of how flexible WordPress is, on how popular it is, but then we are making it more user friendly. So we are taking it in a way that we know it will be easy for our publishers to learn how to navigate on it and also connecting all of our platforms together so they have one unique environment where they can do everything that they need to do on their daily activities.
Carol Cavaleiro:So over our websites today, you log in to our CMS. You can serve ads because we have we created this plugin that connects to our ad serving platform. You can configure your, revenue options, like donation, a donation page, for instance. You can easily configure that from the same back end that you would create a new post, for instance. And you can also prepare and send emails to your subscribers, for instance.
Carol Cavaleiro:So it's taking advantage of this flexibility, but also knowing that we need a standardized approach. Right? You need to make it more you need to make it easier for people to learn it like he was intuitive. Like, so easy to learn that if you play around for half an hour, you got it. Like, you you know where things live.
Carol Cavaleiro:But of course, providing only tech tools is not enough. So we also have an amazing support. If you have any issues about editing, honestly, you can always reach out to us and we have like a very responsive support. And then we do like this coaching. We do these ex we call it expert services, the expert offer that we have.
Carol Cavaleiro:But it's less of a consultancy, it's less of a coaching, but more of like you could have an audience expert working for you in a few hours every month. Right? So this person brings all the knowledge. It's less expensive because you're not hiring full time anybody and you don't have to, like, to do interviews or anything. Extra storage comes with the knowledge that we have across our network.
Carol Cavaleiro:So it's like you can you can have somebody in house working with you, but focusing on audience, engagement or focus focusing on out serving or selling ads, making direct sales for you. And you can achieve that through fractional services. Right? So you can pay a few hours. You can purchase a few hours.
Carol Cavaleiro:It can be recurrent or it can be sporadically. So if you have a big campaign up next month, you can purchase a few hours, and our experts will join in.
Steve Burge:So you have about a a 100 publishers on the Indigraph platform now. Right? What does a what does a typical publisher on your platform look like? Are they are they a small regional newspaper? Are they a start up?
Steve Burge:What kind of people are attracted to putting their website on Indigraph?
Carol Cavaleiro:Usually, they'll they are solopreneurs. So
Steve Burge:Okay.
Carol Cavaleiro:It's just one person. One guy that does everything, that takes photos, writes articles, that writes emails, that does everything. So it's solopreneurs most times. Then we have, some publishers from New York. A publisher, that covers the rural area of California and it's on New York, and she lives in the Indus Desert.
Carol Cavaleiro:Some other publishers, they are they are hyperlocal, so they cover this specific city. But I think most of our publishers, they yeah. They are local local publishers that they always always share, like, this passion in common. Like, they just want to make their neighborhood a better place, basically. They just want to connect with their own communities.
Carol Cavaleiro:They just want to share the information across their communities. And a lot of those publishers does that really, really well. So they often have a very engaging audience. Their newsletters always have, like, a very, very good reply. So the, like, the the community always engages back with them, if that makes sense.
Steve Burge:So when I when I first found Indigraph a couple of years ago, you were very much driven by newsletters. It was you'd come to the Indigraph website. It would be website and newsletter. Now from talking with you, I think you've expanded your services quite a bit beyond that. But from listening to you now, it sounds as if the newsletters are still a significant part of what all the publishers do that that is particularly in the days of SEO declining and social media traffic declining.
Steve Burge:A lot of these small publishers are relying very, very heavily on the newsletters?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. I think so. And I think because the in US and Canada, this is a model that works. It it works for a few reasons. First, because you take ownership of your distribution.
Carol Cavaleiro:So you're not relying on social media anymore. You're not relying on algorithm. You're relying on your email sense. So this is pretty, like, a a pretty big factor. Second, because I think a lot of publishers can drive revenue via newsletters.
Carol Cavaleiro:So can they they can make, direct sales, for advertisers and run it over their newsletters. So their newsletter become, like, this very strong revenue stream for them as well, especially because some publishers, they are located in areas that the that their community wouldn't be paying much to support their their community. Does it make sense? Like, I think I want to rephrase that. Some most of our publishers some of our publishers, they are around they are in communities that people don't they can't afford paying much dollars to a local media.
Carol Cavaleiro:Like, I think the average ticket would be, like, $5. So for you to have a revenue that actually make you sustainable, you indeed like, I don't know, a million supporters. So a good way for you to monetize your traffic, to monetize your website is through direct access.
Steve Burge:So I know Indigraph is based in Canada, and a good proportion of your audience is based in North America. And it sounds as if the business model is kind of understood up in The USA and Canada. You can send out newsletters. You can send newsletters with ads or maybe driving revenue. But you mentioned that you're considering expanding into Latin America.
Steve Burge:I imagine the business model, the business challenges, that just about everything is going to be quite different if you're launching a reader supported publication in Mexico or Brazil, for example.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Sure. Sure. Right. Latin America is a different challenge for a few reasons, like some you've you've already mentioned.
Carol Cavaleiro:Most people, they don't really have a computer, but all of us have phones. We use a lot of WhatsApp mainly because WhatsApp doesn't eat your mobile data. So it's basically for free. So you can send messages back and forth for free.
Steve Burge:Oh, is WhatsApp excluded for mobile data charges in quite a few countries?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Especially in Latin America. In Brazil, for sure. In Argentina, for sure. I think in Mexico as well.
Carol Cavaleiro:So it's it's part of their lives already. So when I talk with my parents, I don't call them. I message them on WhatsApp. In one hand, it is easy for you to build a community, a highly engaged community, because, people will get your messages, and they will reply, they will engage. On the other hand, WhatsApp, it's another private company from Meta.
Carol Cavaleiro:So, how how can you balance that is definitely a challenge. Right? How can you create some sort of independent distribution system if you rule out WhatsApp? So that's another challenge that we have. Also
Steve Burge:So also, some of the publishers you're working with, when they consider WhatsApp, it comes with real pros and real cons as well. They Mhmm. They have to consider carefully whether to try and drive their audience to their WhatsApp channels. They have they have to think carefully before they decide to do that.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. But I don't think in Brazil, this is I'm not sure. I'm I'm talking about, like, my specific view here. So I don't think in Brazil, it's more of a choice. It's like, if you don't have a WhatsApp channel, you're missing it.
Carol Cavaleiro:Right? Like, you're just not reaching the choice of choice. So I don't think they they wait where whether they should or shouldn't is becomes almost like a must have. So if you don't have it, it's your loss. We do have a few publishers in US that covers the borders.
Carol Cavaleiro:So a lot of publishers, they they do services for immigrants, or they help immigrants to get their visa, or they they cover the crossing. Like, they cover the borders. And a lot of our publishers live their lives in the borders as well. So that's nice about the the the local journalism because they are they know it so well because they live it. And for them, it's a must have to have WhatsApp because their readers are there.
Carol Cavaleiro:And that's how they can create a more open and accessible channel of communication with them as well. Right? Like, they are just an audio away from you. We have one publisher specifically. It's called Connect Arizona.
Carol Cavaleiro:She has a very bright live community over WhatsApp, But they also do real person events, but they invite people over WhatsApp. Right? They also have this podcast with specialists that they are answering their community questions, and these questions come via WhatsApp. So it's impossible to to detangle one thing from the other. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Like, you can do your best. You can have your podcast elsewhere. You can have your website with your content. But if you want to make it truly accessible, you have to write to have some element running at WhatsApp.
Steve Burge:So I'm I'm English. I live in Florida. I've got family all around the world. Lots of Latin American friends here. So my just looking at my phone now, there's tons of WhatsApp messages pinging on my phone.
Steve Burge:I need to I need to put it to one side because WhatsApp is constantly pinging. But I'm not sure I perhaps quite understand what a a newspaper's presence looks like on WhatsApp because a lot of us understand it from the idea of chatting back and forth or I I use it for phone calls as well. It's a reliable phone calling system. But what does a what does a WhatsApp presence look like for a publisher? Are they publishing stories and also having, like, a free form community discussion in a separate group?
Steve Burge:What what does that experience look like for a for a publisher?
Carol Cavaleiro:I think it it really depends on how you wanna craft craft it. Okay. I I can I can share a few examples? So back when I was at my tech checking agency, we used to have a WhatsApp chatbot, for instance. You can send her things that you'll find might be disinformative, and the bot will fact check it for you.
Carol Cavaleiro:It would it would feed from our our articles that we have published. It it was all like a a combination of of rules. But it's basically a very smart bot, and you can configure it via the business platform, not a business platform. You can also run newsletters via WhatsApp, the same thing that you do daily, sending your content using Mailchimp or using in the email. You can do it via WhatsApp as well.
Carol Cavaleiro:It will fetch the latest content that you publish over your website, and it will send over over WhatsApp. And, of course, this this has to go through Meta. Otherwise, you get flagged as spam. So you have to have Meta business. Other people, they like to have less formal channels.
Carol Cavaleiro:So they create, like, a master group. And inside this group, they create subgroups. So you have one for communication notes that only admins can post, or the other one, it can have a community discussion around this specific topic. The third subgroup, it can be around a different kind of topic. So it's it is a really flexible tool, and you can decide how you want to to take the the best of it.
Carol Cavaleiro:But I think from my previous experience, I'm not sure how how much they change it now. But when you're you're using the Meta Platform, you need some some level of coding to connect the APIs together so you can send automatic messages as well.
Steve Burge:Is that something that Indigraph can do? Are you looking to build some kind of WhatsApp tools, some integrations to to help with your expansion into Latin America?
Carol Cavaleiro:At this moment, no. But it will be definitely well, I'm not sure if it's definitely something that we could do. Because, like, you need a a Meta business account. Right? If Meta then everything in Canada.
Carol Cavaleiro:I'm not sure how how this works. But in my previous organization, you had an account that connects your all of your Meta products. So your Instagram, your Facebook, and WhatsApp, they are all connected The same. So you manage everything together in the same source, basically. But what I know for sure is that we definitely need to step up our game around things that are not that goes beyond text for sure.
Carol Cavaleiro:For sure. You can still have a website full of full of content. You can still have that. But what most of our publishers have, for instance, is, this, text to audio converter because their readers will listen to your article Mhmm. Instead of reading it, even though they know how to access your website.
Carol Cavaleiro:So the more that we can expand beyond text, like with short videos, or social media, the better is for these local communities, I think, especially in Latin America.
Steve Burge:Also, if you click through to, say, a Mexican publisher that's on your platform, there's a very high chance there will be an automatic converter at the top of the article. You can press play. You can read the article or have it read to you.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. And likely, they will also have a big YouTube channel, and likely, they will have some sort of support channel on on WhatsApp, either to receive questions or an automatic bot support, some sort of, like, automatic messaging. Our our publishers that are that even though they are based in US, we have only one publisher based in Mexico. But if they are handling Latin communities, they have to have more than just a newsletter. It's a must have.
Steve Burge:Also, the future of your platform is going to be allowing your publishers to grow in different directions. It could be could be podcasts. It could be a YouTube channel. It could be WhatsApp. A lot of that may depend on on the country they're in.
Steve Burge:I mean, Dan, correct me if if I'm wrong on this, but it sounds as if you couldn't even create a a meta business account for a publisher in Canada.
Dan Knauss:Right. You think it it pushed everyone out. So there is an maybe in those countries, there's an incentive to own your own platform. And I think a lot of people went to WordPress and and opened systems like that for that reason. But there's also a big loss of market.
Dan Knauss:Like, that hasn't they've lost those channels.
Steve Burge:So the the Canadian publishers are just a little a little poorer, just have a slightly smaller audience now, and that's
Dan Knauss:Yeah. That's a real
Steve Burge:that whole one concern.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. That that's they've lost engagement. They've lost market. And that what people are doing to consume news is more like meme based, very brief visual stuff people are sharing around. That's how information is flowing.
Dan Knauss:So, yeah, that's a real concern to, you know, traditional journalists and and people who see the importance of an informed voting population.
Carol Cavaleiro:I think it's pretty much the consensus in in Canada that you need to own your distribution system. Like, it it has to be independent. You have to do something else. Otherwise, you're you're not getting your news anywhere. We do have a few publishers in Canada that joined forces, and they have I think they are using a service called, Rigged that it's a combination of a lot of Canadian publishers.
Carol Cavaleiro:So you can display a widget on other people website running your content as well. So you make sure that the same reader that is over. People.quebec, for instance, can see a brief article from the breach, for instance. So you can reinforce this, like, this this kind of distribution system.
Dan Knauss:Is that a is that a form of of a federated system? Is that I was gonna ask you. I was curious if if things like Mastodon are of increasing interest in in Canada, in, well, in any any of your markets.
Carol Cavaleiro:A lot of our publishers move to Mastodon even in US. Okay. So, yeah, I think I think they are pretty convinced that you cannot rely on these platforms anymore. You have to find other places. Yeah.
Carol Cavaleiro:But we are still trying. Right? Like, we well, changing social media is one thing, but the same thing that happened with Meta can also happen. I don't know. Can also happen with other social media.
Carol Cavaleiro:So you have to keep looking for this independent way of sharing content. And I think this is something that Nidigraph is definitely considering, like, how we can expect that, how we can better support our publishers in that sense. Of course, we have it on our newsletters. We always share content from publishers, but it feels like an issue should be more than that. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:So it cannot only be text. It cannot be on a specific format. It can be an issue more dynamic. Also, a lot of our publishers in Canada went completely offline. So they decided to go to the streets, put up billboards like they used to do in the printed times.
Steve Burge:Really?
Carol Cavaleiro:Handed off flyers going to their their local schools to talk about news, to talk about the importance of news. So I think there's also, like, this factor that brings things to to the real life. Right? Like, to real in person experience as well.
Dan Knauss:I'm curious if slightly more technical question. If you've explored ActivityPub for WordPress at all. Is that a familiar technology? Just it's essentially federates WordPress so that it can actually work like a Mastodon server and interact with them or other other WordPress sites that are also
Carol Cavaleiro:Person, right. I'm not familiar. But if you can share me the link, I would really appreciate that.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. I'd love to. Yeah. I hope I hope I can can convince some of you to your your colleagues to to come to WordCamp Canada in Ottawa in October. We we are having Dave Weiner who created the RSS spec protocol for RSS feeds way back in the nineties.
Dan Knauss:He's one of our keynotes. And I think we'll also get Evan Pedromouf, who's in Montreal, who's written the ActivityPub implementation for for WordPress that it has. And though that's, you know, a promising technology for a distribution system by saying, my WordPress, you know, my Mastodon server, they all use this ActivityPub standard. We're in league with these other sites, these other publishers, and we wanna be able to share information, comment, you know, even publish together, share audience, and and control that that whole network.
Carol Cavaleiro:Please send all the information my way.
Dan Knauss:Yeah. Yeah. We should chat.
Carol Cavaleiro:Publisher. You definitely.
Steve Burge:Carol, you are the the product director for for Indigraph, and you've got all these options we've talked about. You got you got WhatsApp. You have Mastodon ActivityPub. You have newsletter tools, revenue tools, lots of opportunities. What are you focused on right now at Indigraph?
Steve Burge:What are the what are the problems you're already thinking about, the problems you're trying to solve?
Carol Cavaleiro:Good question. So currently, I'm focusing on enhancing our our connection, our in internal tools connections. So enhancing our help how our ad serving connects with our email, how our email connects with our website. Enhance it should should be more feature rich, but also to be easier and save more time for our publishers since they are all solopreneurs. So the more time that we save for them, the better.
Carol Cavaleiro:So that's my current focus for today. Besides that, usually, as we are talking about Latin America, there is, like, an element that we haven't talked about yet, but it's how to make it more to make sure that our servers are secured, that no one to ever remove any content if they feel threatened or something. And these are considerations that I think we should have before entering Latin Latin America. Mainly because the founders, they are Canadians. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:So the way that things work in Canada may not be the same that they work elsewhere. So I think there's also, like we are searching for this knowledge. We are trying to learn from it. Like, how can we make our servers more reliable? How can we make our website, email platform, everything more secure to avoid hacks, to avoid DDoS attacks, to avoid government bans, for instance.
Carol Cavaleiro:And I think it's important for us to consider that as well.
Steve Burge:Yeah. The I've saw a really good talk, I think, about twelve months ago from a hosting company that was supporting a a WordPress site based out of The Philippines, which really became a a real target for people that didn't want that site to be publishing. And all all the problems that you mentioned from the server to d DDoS attacks to hacks, they were all thrown at it. And it's not a not an easy job to be keeping a publisher online if someone really doesn't want what they're publishing to be available.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. Exactly. I think I think this publisher is called Rackler. I
Steve Burge:Yes. Yes. I remember
Carol Cavaleiro:that story.
Steve Burge:Yeah. Yeah.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. They're truly heroes.
Steve Burge:Carol, at the end of every episode, we ask our guest to think about really interesting publishers who they get excited about seeing. If if a newsletter from them drops in their inbox or they see a new article from this publisher who is doing great work?
Dan Knauss:Who who's on your role? Everyday. Or
Steve Burge:Yeah. Who's doing great work right now?
Carol Cavaleiro:I would like to recommend a few publishers that we have on our network because they are incredible.
Steve Burge:Mhmm.
Carol Cavaleiro:I I I These
Steve Burge:are Indigraph customers. Right?
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. I would like to recommend The Breach. It's a Canadian publisher. It does a very brave coverage on 30 topics. Their website, it's beautiful.
Carol Cavaleiro:And they have like this eye for design, so everything is like super well crafted. They do videos. They do podcasts. They do a long business investigations. They do books.
Carol Cavaleiro:So they are amazing. Go check the breach. Another one is Kansas City Defender. This publisher started making recording videos on his room, basically. And now they have, like, this nonprofit producing news producer.
Carol Cavaleiro:They offer lots of digital tools. They offer public services for black people across Midwest. They have a series that are amazing. That's called the Defender Handbook that is very, very beautiful. But it's also really cool and empowering because it teaches it basically tells readers how they are doing their own coverage and teach teachers how they can be their own they can mobilize their own local communities to do the same coverage as they are doing.
Carol Cavaleiro:So I think that their work is just amazing. Also, have we have a few publishers that are covering the borders. So I think it's important work because they are bringing, like, this national topic to a local solution. Right? Like, how their local communities are responding, to this big national topic.
Carol Cavaleiro:So we have Connecta Arizona. We have Connectioni Grande. We have Rio Grande Guardian. They are all publishers that are active around the borders, and they are covering the borders. We also have a few publishers that are running LGBTQ plus covering communities around Ohio.
Carol Cavaleiro:I think we have Illinois. They're the Black Eyed Flame and Illinois Eagle. They're amazing.
Steve Burge:Uh-huh.
Carol Cavaleiro:And just to wrap things up, I would like to also recommend Shasta Scout. There is she's covering politics in the rural California. She is kick ass. She is amazing. She she told me once that on her on her social media, she's like creating a window to the reporter's life like she was a reality show, a reality TV show.
Carol Cavaleiro:That was fantastic. And Harvey Vortero that are based it's a high probability based on the Nileus Desert covering Harvey, the city of Harvey in Chicago.
Dan Knauss:So Harvey World Herald. And and then you previously, you were talking about Shasta Scout. Is that her name? Like, that's a great brand. Yeah.
Carol Cavaleiro:That's the name of the publication.
Dan Knauss:By itself. Yeah, it's great. Okay. Yeah, shout out to Scout.
Carol Cavaleiro:We have a lot of amazing So if you wanna please check it out, check all them out at ideograph.com. They're all really amazing and they all have like this passion of making their community strive. So it's really it's it's it's inspiring to see.
Steve Burge:Well, the one thing that seems to be common from all the episodes of our podcast is that the people who are working with publishers find it almost an endlessly interesting business to being because the people they meet, the publishers, it sounds as if these Indograph customers fit that bill as well. All sorts of fascinating people from across Canada and The US who are inspired enough by their community or or or what they're interested in to launch a publication, to work many, many hours to to put in the effort to make their publication succeed, and you get to talk with them every day.
Carol Cavaleiro:Yeah. And and it's nice how you're always learning things from them as well. Like, you learn the specifics on their community and why they do things that way or not the other. So even though it's like a very it's a very big community, but it's also a very particular one because each publisher has, like, this own its own goal, has its own community, learn different things from them, and share the knowledge with us. So it's it's really amazing.
Steve Burge:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Carol. I wish you all the best with with IndiGraph and your expansion, your here's to your success over the next few years. Yeah. Thank you.
Carol Cavaleiro:Thank you so much having me.