We've had a few similar complaints about the new e-Edition as well.

For us we use our standard news workflow and just skip ahead steps to get it online right now.

That sounds like a problem we experience as well from time to time. Usually the staff is good about "fixing" the Start Time but it doesn't always happen and then the story that just published is buried one week back on the website.

I like the idea of a "Now" button near Start Date/Time, but I'd also be interested in the pursuit of a feature that would adjust the start time once an article gets a Site Tag for the first time. Something along the lines of:

When an article is published (DND removed and a Site Tag applied):

• If the Start Date/Time is in the past it will automatically get changed to "Now" (but there obviously needs to be a way to override this for something that is purposefully back-dated).

• If the Start Date/Time is in the future, no changes will to it will be made (because the assumption is this is content being scheduled for the future).

We're finally rolling this out and have a request for additional granularity:

We'd like the option to enable the ability for non-subscribers to still read comments, while not being able to post without a subscription.

If readers see the discussion they are missing it could serve as another incentive for them to buy a subscription or even just a day pass so they can chime in on a particular article.

If the non-subscriber can't even see the comments being made they won't even know what they are missing.

Looks like this just got rolled out: https://www.townnews365.com/releases/software_releases/new-comment-availability-setting-allows-comments-to-be-part-of/article_8c0470ac-e3da-11e7-b318-af0928c5adea.html

We talked about this a few years ago: http://community.townnews.com/forums/1-general/topics/318-ad-free-subscriptions/

This would also be helpful simply for staffers who run a search on assets they are an author of inside the BLOX interface.

Due to the problem you mention with finding obits on the funeral home's site we went the opposite direction and put all obits in front of the paywall by selling sponsorships on that section. (Another sticky issue there was that obits were already content that we were paid to publish so it avoided that complaint from grieving family members.)

I think this will require additional work from Town News.

Ideally it would match against the XMP "Contact Email" field imbedded in the photo and apply the correct user account with the matching email.

Personally I also wish they would populate the Byline from the "Credit" field instead of "Creator/Photographer" since that is a better field to include stylized bylines such as, KEVIN M. COX/The Daily News, while leaving the other field as a simple name for digital asset management purposes.

Here is what I ended up doing. It is far from perfect, looks much better on desktop than mobile, but it got a ton of hits.

http://www.galvnews.com/blogs/in_focus/article_11be7ed0-48db-5227-bb67-c8fc57beeecb.html