WordPress released a theme called Prologue in January 2008, and the interest here was in what it made possible rather than in how it looked. Prologue let contributors post directly from the front page and displayed the result as a stream of recent updates — its own makers compared it to a group Twitter.
The suggestion was that this is the natural shape of a breaking news site: reporters adding details as they arrive, the newest at the top, the whole thing set up on WordPress.com within minutes and at no cost. Because posts could still be categorised, a reader could follow one strand of a running story on its own — police statements, say, or eyewitness accounts — rather than reading the whole stream. A second use suggested was internal and outward-facing at once: a newsroom running one to tell its audience which stories and features it was working on.
The wider point was the one the post had made before about WordPress as a cheap, usable content management system with a large supply of professional-looking designs, most of them free or close to it. Prologue was available to blogs hosted on WordPress.com and as a download for those hosted elsewhere.