Peak Journalism.

Overview

Peak Journalism is a global English news website built around an automated publishing workflow. I founded the project and led its concept, product direction, design direction, and deployment, bringing together a custom WordPress theme and a dedicated publishing plugin.

From concept to publication

The idea was to create a news site where story collection, article preparation, image selection, and publication work together as one system. The website uses a custom theme built from scratch, with a Newsweek-inspired editorial layout, light mode by default, and a dark mode toggle.

My role covered the publication’s concept and direction as well as the design direction and deployment. Claude Code and VS Code were part of the development workflow.

How the publishing workflow works

A custom WordPress plugin, Peak Auto News, collects stories from multiple RSS feeds. It uses the Claude API to generate a new headline and rewritten article body, attaches a real news photo, and publishes the article automatically.

The plugin is scheduled to run every 30 minutes, with a target of roughly 25 articles per day. Its image pipeline looks for Creative Commons photos matched to the story’s person, brand, or product and saves selected images to the WordPress media library.

Development decisions

I replaced a planned n8n workflow with a lighter custom WordPress plugin to reduce complexity and cost. Another focus was finding relevant, appropriately licensed real photographs instead of relying on generic stock artwork or generated images.

The system was designed for automatic public publishing without a draft review step. Keeping that workflow reliable was a central implementation challenge.

Features

• Custom editorial WordPress theme
• Light and dark modes
• RSS story collection and scheduled publishing
• Claude API article rewriting
• Real-photo sourcing and media-library uploads
• Author bylines and newsletter signup
• Article optimisation for SEO and generative search

Technology stack

• WordPress
• PHP
• Claude API
• WP-Cron

Tools & workflow

• Claude Code
• VS Code
• Hostinger