Yeah, pmaiorana is Paul Maiorana, he works on the VIP side of WordPress.com, so, he doubtless spends a lot of time explaining these advantages to companies who might have previously felt that WordPress wasn't hard-core enough for real publishing.

The article itself is the usual insane bullshit - despite the evidence staring this newspaper journalist in the face, despite the contrast between her experience and what her WordPress-using competitor is spelling out for her, she is so befuddled that she bravely rolls what is meant to be a comparison between WordPress and Drupal into a bland, impartial, meaningless ball.

She says it took a team of people ONE YEAR to prepare the Drupal-based website for the small local newspaper she works for, The Concord Monitor. WTF. Just look at it.

And can you imagine what the total cost was, spread over a year, including not only the developers fees but, also, the newspaper's own staff costs?

Can you imagine the progress that purely online companies serving the same locality made during the year that she and her colleagues spent whacking their skulls against whatever Frankenstein concoction of Drupal + custom code was being served up to them?

This is why local newspapers are dying, not because technology was inevitably going to wipe them out but because journalists are so used to superficially skimming the details and coming to trite conclusions rather than bothering to actually understand things - decades of poor journalism echoed in bad business decisions.

The Internet isn't killing newspapers, it could have been a huge boon to them, they are committing suicide.

Obviously, I don't have access to the backend of The Concord Monitor but, seriously, I could whip up something more stylish, easier to maintain and with a better publishing work-flow in one day by simply building upon a good Genesis theme, Justin Tadlock's Members plugin, Gravity Forms, Yoast's SEO and a few other old reliables. I have seen the "professional" tools that cost crazy amounts and they are way behind the best of WordPress.

The problem, and I come across this all the time, is that companies have experienced such horrific abuse from their previous CMSes that they simply can't believe this stuff can actually be easy and, of course, there's usually some lazy IT guy in the background, worried that his cover will be blown, persuading them that they need to pay fifty grand for a "professional solution" - this is why the "WordPress is for blogging" meme refuses to die, because a lot of people are making a living from it. When clients are clueless - and print journalists tend to be surprisingly technophobic - such manipulation becomes standard practise, it's an industry-wide Stockholm Syndrome.