Connecticut Health I-Team Launches First Site Using New INN WordPress Platform

The Investigative News Network is excited to announce the launch of the first website built as part of the Largo Project, a WordPress starter theme developed by INN for members with longform, investigative reporting in mind. This past Wednesday, the Connecticut Health Investigative Team (C-HIT) launched their new website at http://c-hit.org.

INN’s Director of Technology Adam Schweigert developed the project, and has been working with C-HIT Editor Lynne DeLucia to move the organization’s site onto the new content management system.

Largo incorporates a number of features from NPR's Project Argo, while significantly expanding the project to make it easier to set up and manage, adding flexibility to better support the needs of a variety of news publishers. Some of Largo's features include a mobile-friendly responsive design, three pre-built homepage layouts, highly-configurable responsive navigation menus and sidebars, built-in support for receiving donations, social media links, custom bylines and author profiles, analytics and additional functionality that would otherwise require additional plugins.

“Adam really took the time to see our mission and then put a lot of thought into tailoring the site so it showcases our investigative work,” DeLucia said. “The feedback so far has been terrific.”

Presentation of longform journalism was a priority. Largo includes formatting for pull quotes and asides, responsive images, slideshows and videos, and support for a variety of other embedded content. Articles can be broken into multiple pages, and heading and body text are optimized for readability on desktop and mobile devices. Social media support is built in, including Open Graph, Twitter Card, and Google authorship markup to ensure optimal presentation of content when it’s shared on the web. Largo also includes a curated list of plugins for additional functionality, so that news organizations can further fit the theme to their specific needs.

“INN’s members create powerful journalism every day,” said Schweigert. “We hope to put powerful publishing tools into the hands of every INN member who wants them, and to continue to grow and develop the platform to make it easier for members to build a digital presence to highlight their work.”

INN members the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, and several others will also soon be launching websites with Largo.

Largo Project was funded in part by a generous grant from Karin Winner, board member at the Investigative Newsource.

"A great strength of INN is to help fledgling journalism nonprofits get off the ground by providing tools not only to do their job but to link members so they can learn from each other," said Winner. "A solid, interactive website will be essential to [journalism nonprofits'] ultimate success."

The code for Largo is open source, and available on Github. INN also offers assistance to its members interested in using it, and those considering a content management system or website update within the next year should contact Adam Schweigert at adam@inn.org for a demonstration.

More information about the Largo Project is available at http://largoproject.org.