Times Company in the group invests in the blog editor

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By BRIAN STELTER
Published: January 23, 2008

Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular platform WordPress publishing blogs, received $ 29.5 million in funding from four companies, including a small part of The New York Times Company.

WordPress is open-source software used by bloggers to publish messages. Its main competitors are Blogger (owned by Google) and TypePad (owned by the software company Six Apart).

Automattic received $ 1.1 million in funding over two years. Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures Partners and Radar were joined by the Times Company, in the second round of financing.

Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic, said the additional funds would provide the company with a profitable stamp, as it invests in other services, including a spam filter and an online identity-product.

The companies did not disclose the size of each investment firm, although the Thursday Times Company is the smallest.

The Times Company had previously maintained a business relationship with Automattic. The site About.com guide, which was purchased by the Times in 2005, is published using the platform WordPress. The New York Times has also produced more than 50 blogs using the platform.

A. Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations of the Times Company, said the company hoped to improve the technology of publishing at the base of WordPress and exploit the platform's ability to aggregate blog.

"As we have adopted blogs, and began to treat it as a great platform for editing, there are all kinds of things we could do in the future to improve our approach," he said.

Citing a possible application of the technology, says Schneider posts on the Internet could be stories starring alongside The Times on its website.