I can attest to the ability of WordPress to run a professional site. We’re a 9 year old pure Internet news publishing company, providing hyperlocal news in two Upstate New York communities, Fulton and Oswego (populations 12,000 and 25,000, respectively). We get between 12,000 and 17,000 visits a day between the two sites.

For our first few years, we were hand-built and I did all the site work. We then worked with a packaged provider, but the limits were extreme. We then worked with some software partners to build a site on the ezPublish platform. Good, but still limiting, and with performance problems that grew with the size of our database.

A few months ago, we turned on v4 of the Daily News, on WordPress. Count us thrilled.

The role-based login system allows us to offer blogs to anyone in the community while preserving most functions for our journalists and key functions to me and my webmaster. The indispensable WP-Cache plugin removes all of the strain on the database by caching content. Other plugins allow us to run a cool looking photo gallery, to insert Ustream code for our live high school sports broadcasts, to insert spreadsheets into pages, and so much more.

Our journalists find it easy enough to use. And the constant development of plugins (like a new one that works with a hosted audio service to allow audio comments on stories) means that we’ll only get better.

You can run a student site on it, but you can also run a professional site on WordPress. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than good enough for us. In fact, it’s doggone close to perfect.