The Story Exchange

What I did for The Story Exchange

The Story Exchange is a New York based journalism non-profit. They publish daily and had got to the point where their old WordPress block setup felt unpredictable. Plugin and core updates had accumulated quietly, the editorial team had lost trust in the publishing flow, and small content errors were creeping into production.

What shipped over the engagement:

• Hosting migrated to Cloudways with a proper staging environment, ending the "change it and pray" loop.
• A modern block editor with custom blocks designed around their specific publishing patterns, not generic Gutenberg defaults.
• A smoothed-out Bluesky-publishing workflow so social posts ship cleanly from the same content flow.
• Each new feature shipped with a short Loom walkthrough. Far less back-and-forth than a written changelog.

How it helped the team

Editorial publishing has its own rhythm. The team is not waiting for an agency sprint to end; they need this story to go up today. Once the blocks were rebuilt around their actual patterns and the hosting was sane, the publishing flow stopped being a thing they had to think about. Weekly calls kept each slice of work tied to what they actually needed for the next month of coverage.

Why this kind of engagement works

Editorial teams move on a different rhythm than agencies. Daily publishing pressure, frequent small enhancements, working relationships measured in months and years. The win was being the calm engineering partner that did not disappear between releases. The kind of partner who could turn a Wednesday morning idea into a working block by Friday.

How I would describe working together

Weekly editorial-team calls anchored the engagement. The team brings what is in front of them; we triage, agree on the next slice of work, and ship it. No long quarterly plans, no surprise invoices. The relationship has the same shape as a senior in-house engineer who happens to work async from Edinburgh.