There's currently no feature that allows author names of articles to be indexed by the search utility. It only works if the byline is entered in manually as opposed to adding an author by registered user account with the CMS. The only way to access a curation of all of the author's articles is to find an article they wrote and click on their author name, where it prompts to a url address like this www.siteaddress.com/users/profile/authorfirstname%20lastname/

Does anyone have examples of staff directory pages they've created outside of static HTML pages on their sites? How about newsletter list landing pages that are more than the out of the box "list" of newsletters available. 

Webinar recording now available.

At this special webinar, the TownNews team shared ideas and best practices for serving your audience and generating revenue during the coronavirus pandemic.

Topics included:

• How to quickly build a high-traffic special section to cover breaking news with BLOX CMS.
• Leveraging the TownNews Content Exchange Network to augment your local coronavirus coverage with nationwide content.
• Using subscription rules to disable your paywall/meter for specific sections of your site.
• Hosting virtual business and career fairs to strengthen ties to your community and grow revenue.
• Using programmatic advertising—and the expertise of the iQ Ad Ops team—to generate incremental revenue from breaking news traffic spikes.

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

This is a feature request to add the Breaking flag to video assets. 

1.WHAT PROBLEM DOES THIS SOLVE:  this allows us to use a LIVE VIDEO ASSET as a breaking news item on our site.  It provides easy access to one or multiple live streams in the case of breaking news.

2. HOW OFTEN WOULD WE USE IT: Often. Sometimes multiple times a day

3. HOW MANY PEOPLE IN OUR ORGANIZATION WOULD USE IT: All content publishers

As broadcasters, our life blood and competitive advantage is video. The easier we can streamline the process for our viewers, the better for everyone.

Curious if any sites are having success with doing paid advertorials or sponsored articles, and if so, how do you separate them from news content or do you have a specific place on site where they are placed?

"Sponsored content" is becoming a larger part of news organizations' revenue offerings to advertisers. But it's important that sponsored content be flagged as such in all formats to ensure the reader can differentiate between what is sponsored and what is actual news content. So we use the "SPONSORED" flag when posting articles through BLOX. However, when we pull articles into an email newsletter, the "SPONSORED" flag does not show up in the newsletter, so the content appears in the newsletter just like any other editorial content. We'd just like the option to have the "SPONSORED" flag show up in the newsletter, and ideally, for the sponsored content to be somehow distinguished, such as a shaded background. This would avoid confusing the reader and keep the delineation clear between actual news content and sponsored content.

So let me pose this scenario:

We've got a story on our the site. Let's say the New Orleans Saints are making roster cuts on deadline day. Our guys are updating their story w/ new player names every couple of minutes. The story tells readers to 'check back frequently' or 'reload the page' for the latest info. How can we best display this info in BLOX so that people who visit a page frequently during a breaking story actually see the most up-to-date info?

We have been getting tons of spam submissions via a feedback form on our site. It's regarding CBD and vaping stuff. TownNews says it's people submitting so a spam filter or recaptcha wouldn't stop it. But just curious if others are seeing anything similar. Ours just started in the last month.

Hey folks, I submitted an idea to Town News, and they said I should post it here to see if this development idea would help others, too. Anything else think this would be helpful?

The idea is basically to add a few new controls — either on the section level or on specific photo types — to allow editors to turn off the "buy now" button on all mugs, all crime stories, or other examples like that.

Town News asked me to answer these questions:

What problem(s) does this idea solve? Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

A: There are dozens of photos used daily on our website that we do not want to sell. Many of these get automated tags that remove the "buy now" button (AP photos, for instance), and that's great. But still a large number of photos get manually tagged with #nosale to keep that button hidden. It would be very helpful to have more specific, targeted and automated ways to blacklist some photos from being sold. For instance, we NEVER want to sell a photo of a criminal who just committed some heinous crime. And a huge number of the mugs we run on our website are handouts that we can't sell, and even the ones that are ours are not any real source of revenue. My proposal would be that we have some ability to turn on/off the "Buy now" button for specific photo types (like all mugs) or sections (so you could turn off sales for all photos attached to stories categorized as crime, for example).

How often would you use this feature?

A: This would be used daily. The automated button removal would impact dozens of stories and several dozen photos each day.

How many people in your organization would use this feature?

A: All online editors would gain from this function, and reporters would no longer have to alert online staff to photos that got missed during the tedious and error-prone manual #nosale application process. Dozens of employees would be impacted.

We have five pages that we want to add to the daily e-Edition, Each page has segmented areas that link to interactive puzzles on our website. We want the ability to copy these pages from one e-Edition to another without  having to re-segment the pages each day.

We are considering building a new "simple" elections platform for the 2020 election cycle and beyond. This would be more streamlined and easy to use than the old Election Stats, and would include AP election data for state and national elections, leaving you to focus on local. You'd still need to update your local race results as often as you want to make them available for your visitors, but the state and national would be automatic.

I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on what you would like to see. Is this something your site could use?

What functionality would you want in such a product?

How are you currently handling election results?

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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.

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