![[illustration-dread_of_Gutenberg.jpg|600]] As for Gutenberg: yes, your dread is probably justified. For a normal website team, the block editor can be fine. For a newsroom full of deadline pressure, varying technical competence, fragile embedding workflows, and people who mostly just need to write, edit, paste, link, caption, and publish without wrestling the interface like a drunk octopus, a forced switch is dangerous. The IT department may be thinking in terms of software lifecycle, maintainability, compatibility, and “the future.” Those are real concerns. But journalism production is not a demo environment. It is a conveyor belt with knives. If the editor gets in the way, the damage is immediate: slower publishing, more formatting errors, more broken embeds, more angry editors, more calls to IT, and a beautiful new era of nobody knowing whether they are editing a paragraph, a block, a reusable block, a pattern, a template part, or a curse. The argument to IT should not be “Gutenberg bad.” That sounds like nostalgia, and they will dismiss it. The argument should be: > This is a high-risk production workflow change. It needs phased rollout, newsroom-specific testing, training, fallback options, and clear documentation before enforcement. The minimum sane transition plan would be: 1. **Pilot group first**, not full newsroom. Include weak users, not just tech-comfortable volunteers. 2. **Real article scenarios**, not toy examples. Links, embeds, captions, perexes, updates, liveblog-ish workflows, corrections, photo placement. 3. **A written one-page survival guide**: “how to do the 12 things journalists actually do every day.” 4. **Fallback route for urgent publishing**, especially breaking news and newsletters. 5. **Dedicated support window** during the first weeks, because otherwise someone will become the unofficial disaster chaplain. 6. **List of known Gutenberg traps** specific to your WordPress setup. The brutal truth: if IT forces Gutenberg on 140+ people without a pilot and training, they are not “modernizing.” They are conducting human-subject research with deadline stress as the active ingredient. When Gutenberg starts approaching like a block-shaped asteroid, one can argue that tools are good only when they reduce friction in real workflows. If they increase friction, they are not innovation. They are furniture rearrangement during a fire.