Changes to Newswire Functionality Coming on April 7

March 10, 2025 Scott Thompson 2-min. read

The Newswire is a frequently used companion service to the theme, and the following proposed changes may impact how you use your site.

Updates will be implemented on April 7 to improve the long-term sustainability of Newswire and provide a more consistent user experience.

The goal of these changes is to reduce the number of variations of news story templates that are eligible for republishing. This will make it easier for developers within University Communications and Marketing to maintain the platform at a high level of resiliency while reducing opportunities for bugs to arise.

A quick summary of changes includes:

Users with the Pro and Premium Tiers will see more blocks within posts when they are republished on their site.
Users within the Free Tier of the NC State Theme will no longer have content republished as posts within their site. Rather the Newswire Feed block can be used to link readers to original posts.
Any posts authored in the Immersive Template from the Premium Tier will always redirect to the original publisher’s site no matter the theme tier of the republisher’s site.
This will not impact any posts imported prior to April 7.

The development resources made available by this change can be reallocated to develop other often requested Newswire features. These changes may include support for additional image formats and additional collection management features.

What Changes Can I Expect?

There is no change in how stories are contributed to the Newswire for other university units to republish.
If your site uses the Pro or Premium Tier of the NC State Theme (v3 or v4), there will be very little change in republishing functionality. The biggest change is more blocks will be included in posts you republish on your site.
If your site uses the Free Tier of the NC State Theme, news posts from the Newswire will not fully republish within your site. Instead you will need to use the Newswire Feed block to show Newswire stories to your users.
If your site uses another theme you will still be able to contribute news stories to the Newswire, but you will not be able to republish stories without taking additional, custom steps to integrate the Newswire into your site.

What is the Newswire?

The Newswire is a system created at NC State for university units to easily share news stories with one another. The system facilitates SEO best practices, allows for news post content updates to sync to all republished posts, and allows for time saving by repurposing content across websites.

Users of the Newswire can be contributors, collectors, or both. Contributors share news stories they’ve written with the university community. Collectors republish stories that contributors have shared. Many Newswire users are both contributors and collectors.