Google LLC has thrown its weight behind a new initiative from Automattic Inc., the maker of WordPress, that aims to create a low-cost publishing platform for small to medium-sized news organizations.

The project officially launched today under the name Newspack. It places an emphasis on local outlets, which have been hit particularly hard by the well-documented monetization and competitive challenges in the modern media landscape.

“Journalists should be writing stories and covering their communities, not worrying about designing websites, configuring CMSs, or building commerce systems,” Jim Albrecht, Google’s director of news ecosystem products, wrote in a blog post. “Their publishing platform should solve these problems for them.”

One of the main tasks that Newspack will aim to automate is infrastructure management. The platform, which is under active development, is set to run atop Automattic’s cloud-based WordPress.com hosting service.

Beyond handling low-level infrastructure management, Newspack will include specialized tools specifically geared toward publishers. They will focus in part on making it easier for outlets to build money-making features into their websites. The goal is to lower the technical barrier for media organizations that don’t have the resources to deploy complex WordPress plugins and write custom code.

“So while Newspack publishers will have access to all the plugins created by the WordPress developer community, the core product is not trying to be all things to all publishers,” Albrecht explained. “It is trying to help small publishers succeed by building best practices into the product while removing distractions that may divert scarce resources. We like to call it ‘an opinionated CMS’: it knows the right thing to do, even when you don’t.”

Google is supporting Newspack to the tune of $1.2 million, half of the $2.4 million that Automattic has raised for the project so far. Other backers include The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, prominent blockchain startup ConsenSys Inc. and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

In addition to financial support, Google will provide technician assistance. The company will help Automattic integrate the project with its publishing tools and plans to collect feedback on the feature roadmap from local news organizations.

Newspack is expected to launch on a limited basis in July with up to a dozen publishers. Automattic and its partners are looking to make the platform broadly available to outlets in 2020 for $1,000 to $2,000 per month.

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