From social media to over-the-top (OTT), everyone is talking about video. At our May customer webinar, Susan Bell, senior product manager of BLOX OTT, will discuss this growing opportunity for local media and how to get started.

Topics include:

• Expanding your audience with digital video.

• Why you need a video strategy and how to start developing one.

• How video can help you boost user engagement.

• . . . and much more.

Join us on May 3rd at 10:30 AM CDT to learn how.

Want to take in the webinar on your own time? Register now and we’ll send you a link to the webinar recording once it’s ready.

When I go into blox, and "Write an Article", I paste text into the body and all returns are removed.  

I understand if all formatting is removed, but why must all my paragraph breaks and returns be removed.  Seems like a bug, and I wanted to report it.  Happens on iOS and Android, Chrome. 

Watch the recording now

The goal of every site is to draw users in and keep them—an engaged userbase usually equates to bigger revenue. At our April customer webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management, and Tim Turner, content program manager, at TownNews.com, shared best practices for making the most of syndication and ways you can make it work for you.

Topics include:

• Best practices for managing syndicated content in BLOX CMS
• Examples of our favorite sites using aggregation
• Tips for getting RSS feeds from the community and other local sites
• Setting up a group content hub
• Working with the TownNews.com Content Exchange

We have noticed an uptick with this problem. Whereas all of my Googling says it is likely an issue with malware on the user's device -- how can we know for sure that the problem isn't on our website? (For the record, about 98% of our ads are served through OAS or Blox. We have NO Google ads on our site -- that I'm aware of, but I don't control the advertising part of our site and don't know much about it. We do have an AP video player that shows Google Ads.)

I have followed all of the advice I see, and even I am still getting the pop-ups (not on every story, but enough to be annoying). 

Thanks in advance! 

We are working on adding new "social override" fields to allow customization of these meta tags at an asset by asset level. The fields would include:

• Social preview image: Ability to change og:image separate from main photo or teaser image.
• Social title: By default it is the headline, but can be overwritten here.
• Social description: By default it is the summary, but can be overwritten.

Here is the part where I would like feedback:

• Twitter card: By default, we will use the "summary_large_image" setting, unless vertical or too small, in which case it will use "summary." If there is no image, it will use the og:image tag, and will use the "summary."

I can't (right now) create a default per section, so I need some logic that will get close. I think the following:

- We can have horizontal images use summary_large_image, and articles with no image, small images, or vertical images use "summary."

- I could have all articles with images use "summary_large_image," and only articles with small images or mugshot presentation images use "summary." Articles with vertical images would rely on Twitter's photo cropping AI to fix it. Or, an editor could go into the article and create a new social preview that fixes the crop.

- Twitter card could be changed with batch edit.

Let me know what you think!

I think a nice feature would be a custom option within a block to schedule it for certain times.

We currently have a few blocks that I only have show up on a single day of the week so I manually disable it when we don't need it.  Having something with the block options itself where I could schedule it to enable and disable itself would be great.

Instead of URLs picking up an asset's title then generating new URLs when titles are changed, could we consider an SEO title field where an editor could manually define a phrase that would appear in a URL? And the URL wouldn't change as the asset's headline changes?

Example: Story about mass shooting in Baton Rouge

SEO/URL title: Baton Rouge mall shooting
Article asset title: 5 dead in Baton Rouge mall shooting

URL (that wouldn't change): theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/baton_rouge_mall_shooting/XYZABC123.html

Right now we shy away from opting for titles in URLs b/c of the mess it creates with multiple URLs per asset.

This would be used very often by us.

There really needs to be an accounting / reporting function for the user groups that admins are assigned to.

I can easily see how many people are in each group, but the only way to figure out who they are is to open the account of each admin user one by one.

Similar to the Positions dialog under Banner Ads (with Assign/Remove function) I should be able to see which admins are in each group from this window as well as remove and add them without having to open the user accounts individually.

Text to audio. Is there a tool we can use with our site that would "speak" our text articles? I've seen this on other news sites. And I am able to get my Alexa Echo to read our website. But wondered about a tool on the site to read articles.

I am reviewing feature requests and other issues surrounding start times and update times of articles. My question to you guys is:

- Is there any reason NOT to turn on important updates?

I'm considering making this feature enabled by default. Meaning, only updates on which you check the "important updates" box will modify the "last modified" time. An unimportant update would still create an entry in the story's revision history (in case you need to track it), but otherwise wouldn't trigger anything on the front end.

As part of this:

- Add "important updates" to all asset types.

- Allow block to be sorted by "update time" (which would include only important updates).

- Add flags or other indicators on the front end when stories are updated or new.

- Add more specific publish date and updated date to front end article (for transparency to readers)

- Remove settings for "important updates" and "add comments to important updates" since they would be default for everyone.

Thoughts?

I would like to request an infinite scroll feature. When you get to the bottom of one story the next story published in chronological order shows up on the same webpage. This goes on for ever. 

The BLOX Go feature is descent, but it is really lacking in functionality. There are several things we'd like to see that would improve this feature:

• Would like to be able to fill out more of an asset's fields. As it stands we can only fill out the Title and Caption fields for an image or video asset, and Title and Content for an article asset. Would like to have, at the very least, the Byline and Slug fields available for all assets in Blox Go, and be able to select Flags for images and videos.

• Ability to modify other assets besides articles. Seriously, this is a major flaw in the system. We can upload images and videos, but once we've done so we can't edit them. This means that if we upload an image from the field and there's a misspelling in the caption, we can't edit it unless we do so through the regular CMS site (not BLOX Go), which is absurdly clunky use if you're trying to do so on your phone.

• I know I'm asking a lot here, but it would be awesome if article or photo assets created with BLOX Go (or in CMS in general) could somehow "write back" to TCMS. Say I upload a photo from a house fire from my phone in CMS. It would be nice if that also created an asset in TCMS that could be used in our print workflow. As it stands we need to create a separate asset in TCMS if we want to use that image in print.

If any of these features are already available, please do let me know.

Thanks,

Brad

When I add a Child Asset to an article, but do not actually drop the Child Asset into the body of the article, I don't like what it does to the alignment of my page: it actually ADDS a "left rail" and shifts the entire text of the article to the right. But the only thing in the "left rail" is an image of that asset I added... so it looks really odd.

This is only an issue on desktop, not on mobile.

It creates an additional problem when I add an Article as a Child Asset to another Article. Now, since I'm in the Parent Article, it's not too much trouble to simply place each Child Article into the body of the Parent Article. But it has now affected the alignment in all of those Child Articles -- because it added the Parent Asset to the "left rail" for each of those Child Articles! So now I have to go back into each of the Child Articles and drop the new Parent into the body of those articles, to fix that alignment.

This is terribly cumbersome and awfully time-consuming, but it's necessary if I don't want most of my articles to be misaligned on desktop view.

The easy fix is to create a default that adds all Related Assets into a horizontal "block" at the end of each article.

Similar to this request from 3 years ago, I'd like to auto-expire some flags. We add "breaking" and "developing" flags to many stories. These flags make sense when they're added, but after a few hours (definitely after a few days) they can be confusing to readers. I'd like for those flags to disappear after a set amount of time. I can recommend how much time that is, or you can let individual sites set that time. 

I don't want to remove the flag — we're using those flags to track stories. (So we can tell reporters whether breaking news stories perform better than an enterprise story, for example.) But if the flag was not visible to the reader after X hours, then I'd have the best of both worlds.

So this is my official feature request. It would solve the problem outlined above. It would be used daily. It would be used by/available to all of our reporters and editors.