In reply to Daniel James.

I would hazard a guess that there are many local news organizations already using WordPress, but they lack the technical skill and development resources to round out their offering. But utilizing the WordPress.com product, they will have the opportunity to leverage a lot, as well as benefit from the resources developing the project. It’s not that another CMS is “what they need.” What they need is an alternative to proprietary publishing platforms that charge exorbitant licensing fees and are not as nimble as WordPress. If I had to guess, I’b be willing to bet many CMS vendors are nowhere near block-based publishing, nor can they do a full Ecommerce integration, if they wanted to.