What Is Arc?

Arc Publishing is a modern publishing system engineered to meet the needs of the world's largest publishers. At its core, Arc is a suite of many different tools that give newsrooms the power and flexibility they need to focus on what matters most: creating quality content.

Many of the foundational aspects of Arc tools are based on editors' experiences in the Washington Post newsroom—what they liked, what frustrated them, and changes they saw coming. It may come as no surprise: Before Arc, the Post had worked with many different publishing systems. For each wave of digital change, however, publishing systems' solutions seemed mainly to involve bolting on some extra piece. The systems that always resulted over time were unwieldy, clunky, and not well suited to meet the ever-changing needs of digital newsrooms.

That's why we formed Arc. Instead of creating a single, do-it-all tool that serves all needs for all people in the newsroom, Arc is a set of many different tools, each of which serves a specific function and works in conjunction in many other tools.

Before we dive into the primary tool we'll be using for development, let's briefly walk through some of the main Arc tools that it will be helpful to know.