WordPress Snub – So You’ve Never Been Freshly Pressed

Freshly Pressed – to a WordPress Blogger, it was like winning the lottery. It put your little blog on the Freshly Pressed Home Page, and that brought thousands of readers to your door.

What were your chances of being Freshly Pressed? I think you have – well, I’m not sure what your odds are, but there were about 50 posts chosen from approximately 59,000,000 posts written each month. That is an awful lot of posts to choose from, which is why being selected had a lot to do with luck.

The Freshly Pressed posts were chosen by reviewing the Tags that you add to your posts. These tags are gathered up and displayed on tag pages which link back to the posts. Certain tags were chosen from these pages, I guess, and the posts with those tags are the ones that were reviewed. There were still be an awful lot of posts to choose from, so they were weeded out by picking the ones with clever headlines. What is clever? That is a tricky question. I know what I think is clever, but I don’t know what the Freshly Pressed Editor thought was clever.

The clever headline posts had to pass a content test and be Typo Free. I don’t know what the criteria was here, but I have seen some Freshly Pressed posts that I’d like to correct with a big red pencil, so there is obviously some latitude.

If the content was good, then they would like you to Include Images (original or properly credited). But this wasn’t a hard and fast rule either, I don’t think. I’ve seen Freshly Pressed blogs that had no images, or images without any obvious credit.

I’ve seen Freshly Pressed blogs that came from brand new bloggers, and ones from bloggers who had a million views. So I don’t think size and audience figure into being chosen.

50 Freshly Pressed posts a week times 52 weeks is 2600 posts in a year. That does not mean, however, that there are 2600 different bloggers. For some reason, once you have been Freshly Pressed once, this honor seems to follow you like a lost puppy dog.

Update 2015: The WordPress Daily Post recently discussed ‘The Dark Side of Freshly Pressed’. My take from this article, and the comments that were left: 4 people pick the Freshly Pressed posts; they have some favourite bloggers, which is why some are Freshly Pressed many times (the record is apparently 16 times); Freshly Pressed is going to be replaced by an online magazine called Discover.

I think there were too few resources (staff people) doing the picking, which might explain why the whole thing came to resemble the work of a High School ‘In’ Group.