How to... Create a News Story

Body

All news stories are created on the Content Hub webpage. You will need to be logged in to access the ability to make pages. On the top bar, click content, add content, then news story.

The content hub interface, displaying where under the content menu you create a news story.

 

You will be taken to the Create News Story page where you can begin inputting your story's information into the various fields. Organizing information like this helps Content Hub understand your story and how to sort, organize, and display it.

Showing the content hub interface for a news story.

Headline is a required field. This is both what your article headline will be and what you will identify it by in Content Hub. You can change this later if necessary.

Author/Byline lets you add the name of any content hub contributor. Search for your name or the name of an appropriate author, then select the name to lock it in. This system ensures all articles written by one author are associated to them if you view the author page.

Display date is the date you want to show on the news article as its publication date. This does not impact when the page is published in any way. That will come later. However, if you need to backdate an article or set this for some time in the future, you can set it here.

The Summary field is required as it is both a preview for the article topic in lists and what is used for social media and search results previews. Making the summary a good representation of the article’s content will help boost its SEO ranking.

The Thumbnail field is also required and is also used for news list, search results, and social media previews. This image follows the Thumbnail image requirements. Using an image within the provided dimensions will help ensure your news lists do not have uneven thumbnail images.

Display of the body text field of Content Hub
Be aware you can swap the field into Full HTML mode if you need extra formatting options.

The Body field is where you will place your article content. You can place nearly anything you could put in a Basic Text block here. We recommend you use article readability best practices to break up your text using headers, quote boxes, and other text styling. Images and video may be embedded and are encouraged.

If you are copying your text out of Microsoft Word, you might accidentally be bringing a bunch of code into the page that can throw off updates! We ask that you use a tool such as Word Clean Up or Grammarly to remove the formatting. You can also strip the formatting out by pasting your document into a basic text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac), then copying the cleaned text into the article body. This takes a bit extra but helps prevent potential errors in formatting that will take more time to clean up later.

Once you are done formatting your article, you will need to tag topics and people mentioned in the article. These must be already added to Content Hub to be used. Topic tags will associate different articles on the same topic together. They can also be used to create custom filters. See the Topics page for more information on how you can utilize this field. The People mentioned in this story field works in much the same way, allowing a reader to see any other articles a given person is associated with, as well as background information on the person.

display of content hub's news story creation page, from topics to the save buttons

The next field is “share to these sites,” which is key to Content Hub’s functionality. If you want your article to show up on a site, you need to add it via this field. Much like topics or profiles, you must use the specific name registered within content hub for this to work. The benefit of this is that an article can be used on multiple websites, creating a network of content.

If you want an article to publish right away, change the status to Published and save it. If you are going to work on it more, save it as a Draft. If you want it to go live on a particular day, set it as a draft, then use “schedule a status change” to schedule the article. Want to see if your article looks good before it goes live? Try using Preview.

Once you hit publish, the News Story goes into a queue to be exported to the selected subscribing sites. This is not immediate. Typically, one can expect to see the article on a site within 15 minutes. This can be longer, though, if your article contains complex formatting, it has a lot of images, or if the queue is particularly long at that moment. If it has been an hour since publishing and your article inexplicably has not exported to your site, please fill out a ticket so we can help you!