Webinar recording now available.

Though videos and podcasts are all the rage, the workaday, unsung article still accounts for more than half of all page views across the TownNews network. How can you make the most of this potential? At our October webinar, Christine Masters, director of product management for TownNews, led a panel discussion on easy design strategies you can use to create high-impact articles that grow and engage your audience.

Topics included:

• Developing your article design “North Star” game plan, with KPIs
• Creating beautiful, magazine-style pages with our built-in Article Designer
• Distributing your content to AMP, Facebook, and other platforms
• Keeping your audience engaged with push notifications
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Webinar recording now available.

Trying to copy and paste is so frustrating. I would love to see it be cleaned up in two ways:

1. When you're pasting plain text, have what you paste appear right where you left the cursor. Now it creates a return before and after that. I don't understand why. It just makes the process longer.

2. Similarly, when you paste copy taken from the body of an article, can you make it so it doesn't jump that text to the bottom of the window? Again, it's just a pointless thing that slows you down. 

Webinar recording now available.

At our August customer webinar, Joe Hansen, Senior Product Manager for TownNews, continued our series on digital advertising. We discussed current trends—including an update on the impact of viewability—and where the future of digital advertising is headed.

Topics included:

• An overview of the TownNews iQ Ad Ops and Google Ad Manager 360 programs
• Using HTML5 creative ad templates in Google Ad Manager
• The differences between Fixed Ads, Smart Ads, Infinity Ads, and Automatic Article ads
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Watch it now.

Don't know if this is the appropriate means for suggesting an improvement, but here goes. There really needs to be a batch edit option within a collection.

I just pulled in a collection through syndication from the Times-Dispatch that included over 100 images of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Since they were not flagged appropriately, the "Buy now" button was appearing on the majority of images. The images all had varied titles and slugs, so my only recourse in flagging them as AP or contributed was to open each file > select the appropriate flag > save and close.

Easy work, but time consuming and unnecessarily repetitive.

This type of situation happens at least a couple of times per week.

Adding a batch edit function to the collections would be an easy fix.

Cover art presentation doesn't "scale" on mobile -- the image doesn't appear at full-width on the mobile screen. That behavior is not documented in the Town News documentation. It would be helpful if all behavior was documented: 

https://help.bloxcms.com/knowledge-base/applications/editorial/assets/article_02c4f17a-65b0-11e7-b196-635adb4dc905.html

Or how would you create one out of the headline list block?

We've received many, many complaints that ads block out text in the phone app. We've contacted customer service but nothing was done. This is a real issue for our phone users.

We are thinking about adding a podcast at our paper, and I've been looking at the BLOX documentation about setting up a /search/ url to create a home for the podcast feed - but I'm not quite able to visualize how this is supposed to work. It would be nice to see another BLOX site that hosts podcasts to see how it looks and to learn how it was configured. I'd like to have both an iTunes friendly RSS feed, as well as a way to have an asset page for each episode with show notes and a link to the audio. The answer "we have a podcast, but don't host it with BLOX" would also be an interesting.

To make compiling analytics on pushes easier, would be so helpful to be able to prepare a downloadable report of all pushes sent to a particular channel, with options on what columns to include in the report. 

At our May customer webinar, Doug Green, product manager for TownNews, will introduce BLOX Offers and show how you can launch a turnkey digital coupon site that drives engagement and thrills advertisers.

Topics will include:

• An in-depth overview of BLOX Offers
• The benefits of coupons in the digital age
• Tips you can use to launch a successful coupon site
• . . . and much more!

Ready to get started? Join us on May 2nd at 10:30 AM CDT.

1. Is there a way to trigger repeat notifications on the same asset? This is a fairly big deal, as breaking news stories are constantly updated as more details are available. The same story could be sent out 3 or 4 times.

2. Is there a way to define custom Facebook preview text? Currently, it seems Notifier grabs the story lede. Could, perhaps, the ‘Summary’ area on an article asset to define custom preview text? Of course, if no Summary text exists, it could default back to the story lede.

3. I’ve attached two images – one shows a Twitter post via Zapier/Buffer; one shows a Twitter post via Blox Notifier. You’ll notice some repetition with the lead text, as it’s also in the story link preview. Ideally, we would like tweets could be structured more like the Buffer version that is a photo post. That means: Structured as a photo post (<Raw Enclosure @URL> element) Text (<Title> <Raw Link>)

You know on any given day that I spend using blox (or nep for that matter) I run into at lease one instance where my life would be easier if I could specify "Not" for a search option.
For example show me everything that's not wire... show me everything that's not sports... show me everything except breaking or developing. 

I understand your UI design goal is to make it so easy a trained monkey can do it but how hard would it be to modify check boxes... 
Empty (not selected)
Click - Checked (selected)

Click - Red X (search excludes this item)

The Guardian is adding a year on their social share images, which is a genius idea.

We've seen several articles that are years old get lots of traffic through social shares that don't indicate that the article is old. Generally, it's not an issue (one that comes up every summer is a guy who died about 4 years ago from a snake bite), but one that resurfaced was about a girl who reported an attempted kidnapping, and people were sharing it like it was new. To the point the PD had to post to Facebook about the issue (they were getting calls). 

Here's why they're doing it: https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/guardian-fake-news-bid-timestamps-social-sharing/

Here's how they're doing it (github): https://github.com/guardian/frontend/pull/21306

I'm going to talk to internal developers about this, but it would be something I'd hope Town News could look at implementing as well.