Newswire
The NC State Newswire allows news stories to be shared between and within campus units.
NC State Newswire lets campus units share news stories with one another.
There are two ways to use Newswire:
- Select stories from other campus units to display on your unit’s site.
- Become a contributor to have your stories added to Newswire so that other units can display them on their site.
To begin using Newswire, first log in at newswire.ncsu.edu.
Select Stories
Any campus unit can utilize content published through Newswire by creating a collection, adding stories to that collection and displaying it on the unit’s site.
Create a Collection
A collection is your own grouping of Newswire stories to be displayed on your site. Most people create one collection for their site, but if you manage multiple sites or need multiple types, you may want one collection per site.
A collection is only for selecting stories you want to republish. It does not correspond to a campus unit that contributes stories to Newswire.
- Log in to Newswire at newswire.ncsu.edu.
- Navigate to “My Collections”.
- Click the red “Add collection” button
- Provide a name and the URL of the site or page that will display the collection.
- Click “Add Collection”
Sharing a Collection With a Teammate
By default, a collection belongs to one user, but teammates can share management of it. To give someone access:
- Ensure the person has a Newswire account. An account is automatically created the first time someone logs in to Newswire with their Unity ID and password.
- Navigate to “My Collections” and click the collection’s name.
- Click “Collection Settings” at the top right.
- Enter the person’s Unity ID in the “Collaborators” section.
Add Stories to a Collection
Choose which stories appear on your site by adding them to a collection. To view available stories, log in at newswire.ncsu.edu and click “Posts.”
Finding and Filtering News Stories
The “Posts” page opens with all Newswire stories in reverse chronological order, which is handy for seeing what’s new across campus. To narrow the list, use the search box and filters on the left side of the screen.
Adding a News Story to a Collection
You need at least one collection in your account before you can add a story. Once you have one:
- Hover over the story and click the red plus sign that appears.
- Choose the collections you want to add the story to.
- When a collection’s title turns green with a check, the story has been added.
Your site should download the story within the hour.
Set Up Newswire on a Site
A few settings control how your site imports Newswire collection stories. Most are set once, during your initial configuration. Your technical support staff can help, or you can contact University Communications. Set up requires your Newswire collection ID(s) and depends on which NC State Theme tier you are using.
Finding the Collection ID
To display stories from a Newswire collection, you need the collection ID.
- Log in to Newswire at newswire.ncsu.edu.
- Navigate to “My Collections”.
- The collection ID is located to the left of the collection name under ID
Free Tier Set Up
To set up a Newswire collection on a website using the Free Tier, use the Newswire Feed block with your collection ID. Unlike in the Premium Tier, stories will not be imported into your own site and stories in the block will link directly to the original posts.
Paid Tiers Set Up
If your site uses the Pro or Premium Tier of the NC State Theme and you have the Newswire plugin activated, news stories will be imported into your site. You also have access to more settings.
Editing Imported Stories
You can edit some parts of a imported story but not others. After a news story imports, you can change the title, excerpt and featured image to better suit your readers.
You can’t edit the body in the current version of Newswire. Keeping the body locked lets it update automatically when the original author makes a change or correction.
Paid Tier Newswire Settings
Access the following settings in your site’s WordPress dashboard under Settings > Newswire Settings.
Newswire Collection ID
Add the collection ID(s). Separate multiple collection IDs with a comma.
Auto-Publishing Articles
When this option is on, imported articles publish automatically. When it’s off, they save as drafts and someone has to publish them manually.
Article Attribution
When this option is on, a short sentence is added to the end of each Newswire story noting where it was first published, with a link to the original.
Redirect all Newswire posts
When this option is on, news stories will redirect to the original link where it was created.
Become a Contributor
Becoming a contributor means your stories are added to Newswire so that other units can display them on their site. To become a contributor:
- Create a Posts category on your site for Newswire to pull stories from, for example a category named “Newswire”.
- Pulling from a single category lets you curate which of your stories reach the wider campus community, since not every story needs to be shared.
- When you’re ready, complete the UComm Dev Request form and include the category’s URL. The request will also ask what type of content you produce most often and how it may interest the larger campus community.
- University Communications website developers will work with you or your technical support staff to start pulling in your stories.
Training
The Site Administrator workshop offers a brief introduction to Newswire.
Frequently Asked Questions
I categorized a story as “Newswire,” but it is not being imported. Why?
This is usually an issue with publish order. The import process scans your site from newest to oldest post by publish date. It stops when it reaches a post that has already been imported. So if your most recent imported post has a later publish date than the missing story, the missing story will never import.
To avoid this, categorize stories for Newswire when you publish them.
If you need to push an older story to Newswire, there is a workaround. Change the publish date of the missing story so it becomes the most recent post on your site. Imports run every hour on the hour, so time your edit around that schedule. Once the story appears in Newswire, you can change the date back to the original if you want.
We plan to make imports more flexible in the future.
Why is Newswire better than copying and pasting an article?
When you use Newswire, any edits the original publisher makes to the story body appear on your site too. That matters because misspellings and factual errors happen, and corrections carry over automatically.
Newswire also gives you one place, newswire.ncsu.edu, to see what’s been published across campus. That is easier than checking multiple sites.
Copying and pasting content from another site can also hurt your search ranking. Newswire avoids this penalty by how it copies stories and by telling Google the original source.
How does Newswire handle shortcodes within a story?
When you set up Newswire, you can choose to keep all shortcodes or strip them all out. Shortcodes in University Communications themes generally render without problems in other UComm themes. UComm also publishes a list of shortcodes, their intended uses and supported parameters. Other theme developers can use this list to add common shortcodes to their own themes, which also helps future UComm themes render older stories.
Does Newswire work with all WordPress themes?
Mostly. Newswire was built for interoperability, and basic stories should display without error in almost all WordPress themes. Stories with unique designs or heavy use of shortcodes may not render correctly. In those cases, redirect readers to the original story instead of importing it into your site.
Will Newswire work with a CMS other than WordPress?
Yes, but it takes extra development work. Newswire uses the WordPress REST API to download stories from contributors, and you can write additional API connectors if needed. Newswire server outputs an API with a custom schema. A new CMS would need to download, parse and store the data from that API.