Q2 was a quarter of refinements and long-awaited overhauls. From AI-powered editorial tools to a completely rebuilt newsletters admin, the updates we’ve made this quarter span every part of the Newspack experience: publishing, audience management, and the everyday workflow of your team. Here are five of the most noteworthy updates.
1. A native solution to manage content gating
For years, Newspack used WooCommerce Memberships and Teams for WooCommerce Memberships plugins to power content gating. It worked, but it was a third-party plugin originally built for e-commerce, adapted over time to fit the needs of news publishers. That meant more complexity, more dependencies, and a setup experience that didn’t always map naturally to how news subscriptions actually work.
Access Control is the replacement we built from scratch, native to Newspack, designed specifically for news publishers. It supports registration walls, paywalls, metered access (both anonymous and registered), IP-based institutional access, premium newsletters, and more. Because it lives inside the same core platform as your subscriptions and reader revenue tools, access decisions and subscription status stay in sync without the friction that comes with a third-party plugin in the middle.
We started the rollout in Q2, completing the first publisher migrations in early June. Our goal is to have every publisher using Woo Memberships tools moved over by mid-August. The migration is handled entirely by us. Publishers will receive a heads-up before we make the switch; we replicate the existing gating configuration exactly, verify everything before going live, and confirm again after the flip. Nothing changes for readers, and publishers get a lighter, more capable system where all new gating features will land going forward.
2. AI-powered tools for your newsroom
We’ve been building AI-powered tools for Newspack publishers, and this quarter we started putting them in your hands.
Newspack Experiments is a new section in your Newspack settings where you can opt in to features we’re actively developing. We launched with two tools:
- The Editorial assistant works inside the post editor to help with the parts of publishing that happen after the writing is done. It can suggest headlines, surface key takeaways for a summary box, and identify strong pull quotes, with a brief note on why each one stands out. Every suggestion is optional. You decide what to use, what to change, and what to ignore.
- The Roundup block helps you quickly assemble a digest-style newsletter by pulling in recent posts with a simple search, then letting you write custom commentary around each one. It’s designed for newsletters, but it also works in posts, making it helpful for weekly recap formats or curated reading lists.
Everything in Experiments is off by default. No NewspackAI features appear on your site until a site admin deliberately turns them on, which means publishers with union agreements or editorial policies around AI can continue as normal.
These tools use OpenAI to generate suggestions. When you use them, the content of the post you’re working on is sent to OpenAI’s API for processing. OpenAI retains this data for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, then deletes it. Your content is not used to train their models and cannot appear in ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product.
We’re calling these experimental because that’s what they are: they work, they’re supported, and we think they’re useful. But they’ll get better with your input.
3. A completely rebuilt Newsletters admin
We rebuilt the Newsletters admin from the ground up to match the modern WordPress editing experience. It is now faster, more consistent, and significantly easier to navigate.
The newsletters list now shows author avatars, status badges, and visibility for auto-drafts, with filters for author, categories, tags, and send list. We moved the Quick Edit tool to a side panel. The Layouts screen now shows visual previews and lets you start a new newsletter directly from a layout. We also redesigned Newsletter Ads and Advertisers with the new Advertisers screen, replacing the old taxonomy admin and adding parent/child grouping and ad counts.
Settings got the biggest overhaul: it’s now a single streamlined screen with a visual grid of ESP brand cards (ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Manual/Other), inline credentials, and one-click authorization for Constant Contact. Ad tracking and Letterhead are now sections within Settings rather than a separate tab.
There’s also a new merge-tag picker: a toolbar button on text blocks and a {} autocomplete trigger that fetches available tags live from your ESP, now supporting ActiveCampaign alongside Mailchimp.
This is the first milestone of a longer newsletter modernization effort.
4. A simpler, more consistent sign-in experience for readers
The sign-in and registration experiences used to be two separate flows: separate entry points, separate modals, separate logic. This release merges them into one. A reader enters their email address, and the system figures out the rest. A new address routes to registration, a known address routes to sign-in, and either way, everything happens in the same modal without a page load or a redirect.
For new readers, there’s one other meaningful change: email verification now happens on the spot. Instead of a link sent to the inbox for later, a one-time code prompt appears immediately after registration, while the reader is still in the flow. That closes a gap where accounts could be created but left in an unverified limbo until the reader remembered to go looking for the verification email.
Less friction at sign-up means more readers completing registration, and a more consistent experience regardless of where on your site they first engage.
5. Newsletter subscribers can now read gated content without signing in first
For publishers using our Access Control system, there’s a new option that removes a friction point for your most loyal readers. Newsletter subscribers arriving from a link in a Newspack-sent newsletter can now temporarily bypass content restrictions for up to an hour, without having to log in first.
The feature is off by default. You can enable it under Access Control -> Advanced Settings. When turned on, readers who click through from your newsletter are recognized as known subscribers and granted access to gated content for that browsing session.
It’s a meaningful quality-of-life improvement for the readers who are most engaged with your work, and removes a sign-in step that was getting in the way of them reading what they came for.
Looking ahead
Q2 closed out with a burst of work across newsletters, reader experience, and editorial tooling. Q3 is where several of these threads continue to develop: the newsletter modernization effort has more milestones ahead, and Experiments will evolve based on your feedback.
We’re also deep in development on a new suite of reader revenue tools designed to give publishers sharper, more accessible data insights, more flexibility in how you price and present subscription plans, and better ways to test what’s actually working. It’s some of the most ambitious product work we’ve done in the reader revenue space, and we’ll have more to share soon.
Read the product highlights from Q1, 2026 if you missed them.
