Successful sites like Bakotopia, Bluffton Today, YourHub.com, and LJWorld/Lawrence.com have this notable aspect in common: Their parent organizations funded the creation of new platforms to run these sites, and now those platforms are for sale. These news organizations have become software companies in their own right -- with all the risk and reward that implies.

That news organizations are developing their own software speaks to the relative weakness of commercial products aimed at news/community sites. This, in turn, reflects the economics of the software industry, where most large and well-established companies aim fully completed, packaged software at consumer markets and manufacturing industries, or around functions common across many customers. These markets have either many customers or customers with large budgets, and processes that are largely the same from customer to customer, requiring less expensive and time consuming customization per customer (a cutting edge, totally unique accounting system, for example, is frightening to contemplate).

News organizations are not like many others, and require software for specific processes that don't map well outside the industry. Such businesses attract smaller software companies, and we'd speculate that small software companies have something in common with new restaurants: a sky-high failure rate. If a company’s selected vendor goes under, that may mean no upgrades no upgrades from the company, no way to make upgrades on your own if the source code is proprietary; and limited (at best) ongoing tech support. ¹⁵

So while building things from scratch seems to be a strategy of last resort, when contemplating the alternatives, it looks better all the time. One of the major reasons for this is the advent of open-source software, as noted below.