TownNews.com and Brainworks Software today announced a strategic partnership aimed at providing new and innovative solutions that help print, broadcast, digital, and web-native media companies jumpstart revenue and audience engagement. Read more

Webinar recording now available.

Grow your audience and drive revenue with streaming video

BLOX OTT enables media organizations to grow their audiences with branded channels on all of the major streaming platforms, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. At our January customer webinar, Susan Bell, senior product manager of BLOX OTT, will discuss what over-the-top (OTT) video is, how you can start making money and expanding your reach with streaming video.

Topics will include:

• An overview of the complete BLOX OTT app suite.
• Populating your channel with high quality homegrown and community-sourced video.
• Turning your OTT channel into a powerful driver of new revenue.
• . . . and much more!

Ready to learn how you can benefit from BLOX OTT? 

Will you be doing any online bracketology options for the NCAA Men's basketball tournament? Might be a good way to sale some advertising especially for your college accounts.

We run into problems sometimes where 2 editors are simultaneously in a block, rearranging pins and then accidentally just saving over one another. It'd be nice for blocks to be locked when someone is in one, much like assets would be locked.

We run into situations, especially in breaking news, where 2 people might have our homepage top stories block open. Both are pinning and re-arranging stories -- but they're accidentally saving over each other's work without knowing it.

What problem(s) does this solve? See above

Why do you need this idea? See above.

How often would you use this feature? Daily

How many people would this affect in our news org? 100+

Hi y'all,

We love vertical collections. It'd be cool if on an individual collection level you could turn on/off photo titles. For example, we love photo titles for listicles but don't like them for live event galleries, where seemingly every photo has the same title. Right now we have CSS on our site that always hides the titles. 

What problem(s) does this idea solve? See above

Why do you need this idea implemented? See above

How often would you use this feature? Daily

How many people in your org would use this? 100+

Hi, is there a way to horizontally display a Twitter list and do it responsively?  For large formats, we would probably look for 5 or 6 tweets, then switch to a vertical feed for mobile formats

On WordPress, it offers users the means to grab a short link for the purposes of social media cleanliness, right there in WordPress. With Town News, we have to go to bitly or some other outside provider to get a short link. Why not add a short-link maker within the system, as it doesn't seem to require much programming to do? It could say "Get short link."

Our Publisher for NUVO.net would like to request the ability to use Amazon as a payment handler. Reasoning Outlined Below:

1) What problem(s) does this idea solve?

Frictionless payment without releasing data or filling out forms.  Universal, unlike Apple Wallet, etc…2) Why do you need this idea implemented? Provide as many problems or use cases as possible.

When we ask for money to read an article the user already only has an 8 second attention span and they don’t like to part with their money.  Make it safe and easy.
3) How often would you use this feature?

Permanently
4) How many people in your organization would use this feature?

Everyone and all readers

Thank you,

Caitlin 

By time we record/edit/post video it is old news. We'd like to be able to create live on the fly and have the system automatically share it to fb and twitter if possible. Perhaps treat it like 'breaking News' and It only appears on the page if we are 'live'. Once we are done , we can go in and add story and move to a section.

Local organizations have contacted us about integrating their calendars with ours. They have been able to accomplish this with other local news sites. This would allow them to post the event to their calendar and it automatically appears in ours. Since most modern calendaring software supports the iCal format (as does Town News), would it be possible to integrate approved calendars? I understand we can currently import iCal, however making this more automated would be beneficial for both us internally and our community contacts.

Join us on August 3rd @ 10:30 AM CDT

At our August customer webinar, we’ll take a deep dive into the numbers that are influencing the news industry today, and explore the concrete ways our solutions can help you thrive in an evolving marketplace.

Here are just a few of the topics we’ll cover:

• How many visitors block your ads? How should you respond?

• More than half of web traffic is mobile . . . What BLOX CMS features can help you serve up a great multi-screen user experience?

• How can you use audience targeting to boost revenue from both drive-by and loyal users?

• Which social media platform delivers the most traffic? Are you optimized for social?

• How can our new collection types—we offer more than a dozen—help you create compelling multimedia content?

• . . . and much, much more!

Join us on August 3rd at 10:30 AM CDT to learn more.

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.

The TCMS "trim for print" feature is nice for stories that need to lose an inch or two for print, but can run in-full online. But the opposite would be nice, too.

This would alleviate some problems, starting with pesky date issues. If print wants to run "today," they could, while online the date would remain "Wednesday" or "Feb. 17" or whatever style was desired. ("Today" in print is often not "today" online — the publication date online is generally a day earlier.)

This also would help when trims made for print cut parts of sentences or paragraphs. It's easy to lose or move the first reference to a person or place when trimming content for print. This feature would allow the complete sentence or paragraph to stay online, and a print-only version of the sentence or paragraph to be written for print.

Any Maryland Blox papers that would pick up this story? https://www.northcentralpa.com/news/year-old-girl-of-williamsport-missing-since-saturday/article_691006d0-756f-11e7-b3af-afe816779c2f.html

Hey, folks — does anyone do webcasts or other sort of livestream via their website?

Hey there!

We recently launched our website in February, and while it's still relatively simple in design, we're always working on integrating new technology in order to stay ahead of our competition; however, two of the integrations I'm still having problems with are Apple News and Google Play Newsstand. 

I have searched the Town News help database and forums for guidance, yet I consistently come up short.

• Apple News - hasn't been updated in over a year, or forwards to the AMP page.
• Google Play Newsstand - simply returns with a "404" error.

While in theory I could publish an RSS feed (which is another problem in itself) to Apple News, I have heard mixed results of success unless you're publishing in ANF — the format Apple is essentially requiring for any sort of success. When it comes to Newsstand, I simply don't know where to begin on the BLOX end for integration.

Could someone please clarify as to the status of these full integrations. Have they actually been released but not updated in the help guide, still in development, or scrapped entirely?