The Washington Post is best known for bringing about the end of the Nixon Administration, but did you know the paper is also in the software game?
Its subsidiary, Arc Publishing, powers websites reaching 600 million readers every month.
Arc Publishing, as that subsidiary is known, has grown from an in-house product team serving the newspaper’s newsroom, to a full-fledged software-as-a-service company. And now it is opening an engineering office in Chicago.
Zachary Perry, a Grainger veteran who has been The Washington Post’s director of platform engineering since 2017, will lead Arc’s local engineering office.
The office announcement follows a huge growth spurt for Arc, which has made 100 new hires in the past year and a half and more than tripled its revenue.
According to a statement issued by the Post, the company chose Chicago due to the city’s deep talent pool in the e-commerce and enterprise software space.
Originally developed as an in-house publishing tool for The Washington Post, Arc has been available to other publishers since 2014. (That is, the year following the Post’s acquisition by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)
According to Arc, the platform has been developed with a particular focus on scalability, seamless ad delivery and minimal downtime. The platform is built on Amazon Web Services — unsurprisingly — and part of Arc’s Chicago team will work on deepening that integration.
According to a 2018 Nieman Lab article, publications on the Arc platform include Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post (obviously).
Built In has reached out to The Washington Post for additional details about the new engineering office, and will update the article with additional information as it becomes available.
