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A highly-engaging News Item with optimized formatting increases human readability, accessibility, and searchability. Reader-friendly News Items rank higher in search engine returns, promote social sharing, and show statistically higher engagement rates in analytics reports.
Every News Item needs
- A Headline that prompts the reader ‘stop, stay, and scroll down’
- A Thumbnail image for social share-ability
- An article Summary. The summary is the ‘meta description’ used by search engines to find, crawl and rank content
- An edited, proofread, unformatted article
For an SEO and reader-optimized news story, add additional elements
- Intro text. One or two compelling sentences summarizing the article's key takeaways.
- Section headings. H2, H3, H4
- One or two related images
- Highlight a key quote or create a ‘Fact Box’
Login to Content Hub
- Go to the Content Hub login screen
- Click ‘Login with your Mason Credentials’
- Enter your NetID and password at the Mason central login screen
You are now logged in to Content Hub
Open a new ‘Create a News Story’ screen
- In the top admin/editor bar, click on the ’Content’ navigation item
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- From the content list screen, click the blue ‘Add content’ button
- From the ‘Add content’ screen, select the ’News Story’ option
The 'Create a News Item' Screen: Build and Format
Headline, Author, and Date
- Add the headline to the ‘Headline’ field
- Option - Select an Author or Byline using the lookup field
- Option - Display Date. Typically, the Display Date shouldn’t be changed unless working with custom list displays.
Summary and Thumbnail: Search Engine Optimization and Social Sharing Field
The Summary text and Thumbnail image combine to become the page's search result snippet and social media preview card.
- Add a one-sentence article highlight to the ‘Summary’ field
- Select, or upload, a 1:1 (square) thumbnail image using the ‘Thumbnail’ selector field.
Placing and Formatting the Article
Copy unformatted text into the ‘Body’ text area. Use the WYSIWYG formatting buttons to:
- Style Intro Text, Headers, Block quotes
- Add embedded images and videos
- Create a fact box
Sharing, Connecting a Profile, and Topic Tagging
Topic tags categorize news items, allowing news items to be found in related searches or displayed together with other same-tagged items in filtered news list.
- Use the ‘Topics’ look-up field to select subject topics relating to the article’s content. Use a comma to separate multiple topic tags.
- Optional - Use the ‘People in this Story’ look-up field to attach associated Mason biographies to the article. Use a comma to separate multiple site names.
- Share the article to at least subscribing site with the ‘Share to These Sites’ lookup. Use a comma to separate multiple site names.
Ready to Publish? First, Preview
- Preview - Use the ‘Preview’ button to check your work before saving. The preview function will not create a draft or published version of the news item. To exit the Preview screen, click the ‘Back to Content’ link on the upper left side of the header space
- In Review - Select and Save if you aren't ready to publish the News Item for export to the subscribing site.
- Published - To publish the page for distribution to a subscribing site, the 'Save as’ selector, choose ‘Publish’ and click ‘Save’.
Additional Publication States
SiteMasonry's versioning workflow allows content to be modified in an un-published Draft state without changing the publically viewable (Published) version of the News Item.
- Draft - The Draft state allows an editor to make changes to a page without modifying currently published content. When a page is in Draft mode, the last published version of the page is viewable by site visitors. Once the page is re-published from Draft mode, a new version of the page is created. The new, published version of the page is 'live' and viewable to site visitors.
- Archive - The Archive state ‘un-publishes’ the content item; blocking the item from being exported again to a subscribing site. To remove a news item from a subscribing site, put the news item in ‘archived’ mode, then submit a support ticket request to ask for the page to be removed on the subscribing site.
Congratulations on your newly published News Item!