How to create, publish and distribute great news stories, shared with your team, on the fly.
LettsNews is simple, yet powerful, newsroom tech for everyone. Below is a comprehensive guide to help you go from gathering great news, to team editing, publishing and distribution - faster than you thought possible.
LettsNews is free for independent journalists, content managers, and PRs. Sign up at LettsNews.com to start creating stories in minutes.
How to Create News Stories using LettsNews
Create news stories in minutes with LettsNews: Simply drag and drop Content Items, then edit, publish and auto-distribute on the fly.
Ever wished you could build and publish professional news stories as easily as dragging and dropping files? Well, now you can. LettsNews is revolutionising news creation by turning the complex world of content management into a simple, intuitive experience that puts you in control.
Journalists gathering news on the fly at a press conference
The Secret? Content Items.
Think of Content Items as your story building blocks. Got a great photo? Drop it in. Writing a compelling piece of text? Add it to your collection. Captured an important video or audio clip? They're just as easy to include. Every Content Item you create becomes part of your library, ready to be mixed and matched into powerful news stories whenever you need them.
From Idea to Published Story in Minutes
Forget about wrestling with complicated content management systems or waiting for technical support. With LettsNews, you're in the driver's seat. Just grab your Content Items, arrange them exactly how you want them, and watch your story take shape right before your eyes. Need to make adjustments? Simply drag items around, edit text on the fly, or swap in different media until everything's perfect. Leaving you more time to research and produce great original content.
Build your Story in the Story Editor, use the Insert Content Items button to plug in any content you've created
Your Team, Working Together Seamlessly
We get it – great stories often need multiple perspectives. That's why LettsNews lives in the cloud, making collaboration a breeze. Share your draft with team members, collect their input, and make edits in real-time. No more endless email chains or version control nightmares. Everyone works together in one space, moving your story from draft to ready-to-publish seamlessly.
Publishing Made Simple
When your story's ready to go, publishing is just one click away. But here's where LettsNews really shines – our auto-distribution system can instantly share your content across multiple leading news sites. It's like having a personal distribution network at your fingertips.
Share your story with your team, and allow team members to collaborate with you easily.
Why Writers and Journalists Love LettsNews
- Spend more time researching and gathering great news items, LettsNews can do the rest
- Build compelling stories in minutes, not hours
- No technical skills needed
- Work from anywhere with cloud access
- Collaborate effortlessly with your team
- Publish and distribute instantly
- Mix and match Content Items for endless creativity
Whether you're a journalist racing against deadlines, a content manager juggling multiple stories, or a PR professional crafting the perfect narrative, LettsNews gives you the tools to create professional news content faster and easier than ever before. Leaving you more time to gather and create great original content that matters.
Ready to transform your content creation process? Join the growing community of professionals who are already using LettsNews to tell their stories. Sign up for FREE at LettsNews.com – because great stories shouldn't be hard to tell.
5 Steps to go From Gathering News to Distributing your Story Faster than You Thought Possible
LettsNews is the fastest way to gather, publish and distribute news. Here's how it's done.
LettsNews offers a streamlined, all-in-one software platform for creating and sharing your stories. By following these 5 steps, you can quickly move from initial news gathering to widespread distribution, ensuring your content reaches your audience at the speed of light.
1. Create your Content Items as reusable blocks for your story:
Before crafting your narrative, gather the essential elements that will form the foundation of your story. This includes:
Facts and figures: Ensure accuracy by double-checking all data and statistics.
Quotes: Capture direct quotes from sources to add credibility and voice to your story.
Images and videos: Visual content enhances engagement and helps illustrate your points. Ensure you have the necessary rights to use any media.
Links to relevant resources: Provide readers with opportunities to explore related information and deepen their understanding.
Think of these items as building blocks. Organise them carefully, perhaps by topic or theme, and use LettsNews' tagging system to make building your stories from Content Items smooth and easy.
Your Content Items page, where you can create any text, image, video or audio content as a building block for any story in the future
2. Build your story and use the reusable blocks you've gathered:
Now it's time to weave your Content Items into a compelling narrative. Consider the following:
Flow: Ensure a logical flow between your Content Items, using transitions to connect ideas and maintain reader interest.
Headline and subheadings: Craft attention-grabbing headlines and descriptions that accurately reflect the story's content and entice readers to click.
Visual hierarchy: Use LettsNews' expansive formatting tools and insert multiple Content Items to create visual hierarchy, making your story easy to scan and digest. This includes using bold text, bullet points, and white space effectively.
Build your Story in the Story Editor, and use the Insert Content Items button to plug in any of the content you've created
3. Share with your Team, get their edits and feedback:
Collaboration is crucial for producing high-quality content. Before publishing, share your draft with your team:
Internal review: Utilise LettsNews' team function to share your Story (or your Content Items) in the Cloud with the rest of your team.
Constructive criticism: Encourage your team to provide feedback on clarity, accuracy, style, and overall impact. Edit directly, or communicate through the Comments function to explain what you're doing and see a full log of all the changes made.
Proofreading: A fresh pair of copy-edit eyes can catch errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Don't skip this crucial step!
Share your story with your team, and allow your team members to collaborate with you easily.
4. When you have finished all your edits with your story, click to Save and then click Publish (the cloud icon at the top right of the page). Once your Story is published it cannot be unpublished:
Use the "Publish your Story" icon to publish your story, and then the "Distribute your Story" icon, which will appear in the same place after you have published to distribute it.
This is the point of no return! Once you've incorporated all feedback and are satisfied with your story, click the Cloud icon to publish. Remember, that published stories cannot be unpublished, only copied as unpublished. Therefore, meticulous review and editing are important before hitting that publish button.
5. Distribute your story:
Publishing is just the first step. To maximise reach, actively distribute your story, click the "radio" icon in the top right of your story detail page and:
Copy for Substack: Use LettsNew's bespoke "Copy for Substack" command to get a version of your story perfectly formatted and dropped into Substack.
Distribute to WordPress: Link your wordpress website or blog to LettsNews and distribute your story with a single click of the button!
Distribute to Medium: Do the same with your Medium blog and have your stories published there at the click of a button too, or select the tick box of both Medium and WordPress distributions and distribute across all of them with a single click of the "Distribute Selected" button
Your distribution menu, where you can select your distribution options, or do multiple at once with the checkbox.
By following these 5 steps, you can leverage the power of LettsNews to rapidly create, publish, and distribute your stories, ensuring your message resonates with your target audience.
If you are a journalist, content manager or PR, sign up to LettsNews.com today!
How To Add Content Items in LettsNews and Create Great Stories in Minutes
The benefits of adding Content Items one at a time in LettsNews, individually as a text (note), image, video or audio.
LettsNews has a unique approach to adding content and news items, requiring users to upload one Content Item at a time singling out text (notes), images, videos, or audio. This enables each Content Item to become a re-usable content building block to quickly and easily drop into Stories. You add Content Items first, then you start to build a Story. Multiple Content Items can be dropped into a story, either one or two Content Items at a time, or meshing text, imagery, video and audio into one expansive multi-media Story - all at the click of a few buttons.
To add news items, go to 'Content Items' at the top of the left-side menu and get going. With just a few Content Items added you can start auto-compiling news Stories, ready for publishing, using the Teams function for rapid sign-off, before auto-distributing it to leading news sites with LettsNews' powerful Distribution technology.
LettsNews 1.0 Dashboard Screenshot
This deliberate design choice of adding one Content Item at a time is not only necessary for LettsNews software to turn Content Items into Stories at-pace and at-scale, but it also provides the added benefit of simplicity, creativity, and maintaining a high-quality, curated content flow.
Why One at a Time?
Central to LettsNews Ability to Build Stories Faster. By adding content one piece at a time in LettsNews software, it then makes them available as re-usable building blocks to create multiple, original Stories faster than thought possible. And, this approach also:
Encourages Thoughtfulness By adding content one piece at a time, users are encouraged to focus on each item, ensuring it is well-crafted and meaningful. This approach avoids the overwhelming clutter often seen with bulk uploads and emphasises intentionality.
Promotes Variety LettsNews values diverse storytelling formats. Whether it's a short text note, a longer story, an image, a video, or an audio clip, the single-item approach allows users to think creatively about the best format to convey their message. It also harnesses the power of the team, enabling each member to specialise in a different type of Content Item, shared with the wider team. Soon we will be adding a Content Store so users can make specialist Content Items priced and offered to the growing community of LettsNews users.
User-Friendly Simplicity Adding one item at a time simplifies the process, making it intuitive for users of all experience levels. This straightforward workflow reduces complexity and ensures a stress-free experience. It also provides a more streamlined curation of any content factory.
Quality Over Quantity By focusing on a single piece of content at a time, users naturally prioritise quality. This aligns with LettsNews’ mission to foster authentic, high-value media development over sheer volume.
The Impact
LettsNews approach adding one Content Item at a time creates a system which builds news Stories faster than thought possible. It also fosters a more thoughtful, team-driven content creation process, reflecting the platform’s commitment to authenticity and creativity while keeping the experience simple, efficient and accessible for all. Delivering news at the speed of light!
If you want to gather, publish and distribute news faster than you thought possible, sign up for FREE at LettsNews.com.
How to Auto-Distribute Your Stories with LettsNews
Setting up auto-distribution in LettsNews is simple. You just need to add your account details to enable LettsNews to auto-distribute direct to your selected WordPress blog or Medium page, and follow a couple of steps to drop your story into your Substack. Soon, we will also add auto-Promotion of your distributed stories to social media sites such as BlueSky, Threads, and Reddit.
Setting Up Distribution Channels
To use LettsNews' powerful Distribution feature to auto-distribute your stories, first you need to set up your Distribution channels. To add distribution channels to LettsNews click Profile in the left-side menu, then click the "Distribution Channels" button. In the distribution channels page click the "Add Credential" button to create a new Distribution Channel, or click edit on an existing Distribution Channel to amend it.
Setting up Distribution Channels in LettsNews
Auto-Distributing your Stories with LettsNews
Once you've finished creating your story, you can publish and auto-distribute it by first clicking the "Publish your story" cloud icon located to the right of your story's title. After doing this you will find the button to Distribute either in the three dot drop down menu, or as the "Distribute your story" icon also to the right of your story's title.
Use the "Publish your Story" icon to publish your story, and then the "Distribute your Story" icon, which will appear in the same place after you have published to distribute it.
If you have selected the "Publish on LettsNews Feed" option in your "Profile" then whenever you publish your story, it will automatically be published to your own personal LettsNews feed, which you can access from "My LettsNews feed" in the left-side menu.
WordPress
The "Application Password" section in wordpress looks like this. This is where you can add a new application password for LettsNews distribution.
In order to set up your WordPress distribution in LettsNews you will need your wordpress username and a valid Application Password. In order to get an Application Password follow these steps:
Go to your website “/wp-admin” page and then go to Users -> Profile and then scroll to the bottom of the page where you should see Application Passwords.
Type in a “New Application Password Name” which will not be needed in LettsNews and is purely for you to be able to follow your Application Passwords in WordPress.
After Typing in the Application Password Name click the “Add New Application Password” button. Doing so will then provide you with a password, which you should copy and record elsewhere, as you will not be able to retrieve it from WordPress again.
In the LettsNews “Edit New Channel” Page you should now put the WordPress Username into the “Site Username” field, and the Application Password into the “Site Password or Token” field and make sure you have selected WordPress in the top dropdown.
Medium
Find Integration Tokens at the bottom of the screen above, when you click it, you will see this popup which gives you the token code you need to set up your LettsNews distribution.
In order to set up auto-distribution to Medium you need to insert your username and your Integration Token. To get your Integration Token follow these steps:
Go to your medium and then go to Settings -> Security and apps -> Integration Tokens.
From here you should see your token which you can copy.
In the LettsNews “Edit New Channel” Page you should now put the Medium Username into the “Site Username” field (including the @ sign), and the Integration Token into the “Site Password or Token” field and make sure you have selected Medium in the top dropdown.
Insert the information you pulled into the "Edit New Distribution Channel" page in LettsNews.
After you have completed the above, save the distribution channel in LettsNews and check the verified field. Check there is a green tick, if there is you have successfully set up your distribution channel(s) and you can automatically distribute your stories through LettsNews' distribution menu.
Substack
To Distribute your story to Substack, choose the option to "Copy for Substack". As Substack does not currently have a public API, LettsNews is unable to auto-distribute your story for you, however our custom "Copy for Substack" button shortens it to a simple copy and paste approach that works well every time.
Your distribution menu, where you can select your distribution options, or do multiple at once with the checkbox.
First you click the "Copy for Substack" button in your Distribute menu, and then simply navigate to your Substack page, click to create a new story, and paste, and you'll find your whole LettsNews story automatically copied in and correctly formatted.
British AI venture group launches a new software app making newsroom tech available to everyone.
A rare bit of good news for journalists, an ambitious news publishing system from the LettsGroup stable went live today. It's called LettsNews and it describes itself as "'Newsroom tech for everyone". The British startup wants to reduce the cost and time taken to gather, publish and deliver news in the increasingly fragmented and real-time news industry. It could be a boon for overly stretched, under-staffed news rooms, and the growing number of freelance and self-employed journalists, writers and PR's.
Today LettsNews launched its cloud software platform for ever increasing news gatherers, commentators, freelancers and PR's that are looking for a better and more efficient way to gather, build and distribute the news. Their web app can be accessed from a laptop, PC or Mac and the all-in-one system can give any writer or PR a fully fledged newsroom in the Cloud. Mobile apps will also be available soon for work in the field.
"Less manual effort, less copy and paste and a brand new platform designed for the fragmented, freelance nature of today's news industry."
More than ever, newswriters are freelancers, independents and even citizens, but their tools for news gathering are rudimentary or wildly expensive. They write in MS Word or Google Docs, they use their phones for photos and videos. They publish their news into proprietary systems like WordPress or WiX, Substack or Medium, X or Bluesky, one at a time - cutting and pasting, at best, each time.
From the family that invented the diary, LettsNews is a slick, cost effective, all-in-one news gathering, publishing and distribution system designed to streamline this fragmented industry and the digital age. When you write in LettsNews, it automatically makes HTML news pages ready for global distribution. Images, video and audio can be cropped and basic-edited in the app, in the field. And its entire approach is quite revolutionary - adding individual Content Items (text, image, video, audio) - one at a time.
Content as re-usable media objects
It's object-oriented programming but for content! Each Content Item you load gets tagged, sorted and organised ready for you to drag and drop into news stories. As your library of Content Items grows, your ability to instantly create news stories multiplies.
"It's a bit like lego pieces, the more Content Items you have the more you re-arrange them to make an endless number of different news stories."
While LettsNews users focus on adding new Content Items, the software can take care of the rest - from story building, to team collaboration, editing, auto-distribution and even auto-promotion of the distributed stories. With LettsNews each News Item component gets dragged and dropped into a News Story and can be shared with collaborators in virtual teams, supported by version tracking and sign off. Teams can be added for each publication, project or work stream, whether it's a company blog, journalist's Medium page, a small publication's site, investor comms or more.
"And as users content grows, AI will further accelerate the process - ultimately delivering some kind of machine-driven newsroom for the masses."
LettsNews dashboard
When a news Story is completed it gets filed by the LettsNews system and published ready for auto, one-click distribution to a number of leading news sites, publishers and social media platforms - with more to come. LettsNews users can write once and distribute to multiple different places, including their blog, at the push of a button, doing what used to take many hours in just a few minutes. And Content Items (notes, images, video, or audio) can be re-used any number of times, dragged and dropped into numerous versions of the same story or new stories, leaving more time in the field or office to research, write and work on new stories.
LettsNews gives you more time to create great content. You can start using the software for free and then upgrade to a paid plan when you're ready.
LettsNews plans to add to its V1 offering launched today, introducing advanced AI to speed its system and the process even more, followed by a Content Item marketplace to help creators monetise news items better than before. Their writers and publishers will be able to buy 3rd party news items or clips (text, photo. video, audio) safely, securely and cost effectively - instantly dropping them into their own news stories - while providing a vital new income stream for news creators.
Add this all up and, in a couple of years, LettsNews could become a next generation, crowdsourced and machine-driven news agency for the masses. One fit for this new, fragmented, digital age. Step aside Reuters and Associated Press? We'll keep you posted.
Newspapers are struggling, social media is taking over and every outfit is cutting costs - but what of the future?
The news is confused. It used to be very simple - media barons owned newspapers, news agencies supplied them with international stories and employed journalists focused on factual news that their readers most desired - you know, like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard on a boozy night out.
Your daily paper used to be delivered to newsstands or flung at high velocity towards your doorstep, taking out the dog on the way. Today there’s a computer game for that! Printing papers and magazines was an art form. We paid a small amount of cash for our news and didn’t mind the advertising. In fact, some of it, we quite enjoyed.
Then the internet changed everything.
Will the machines take over?
CNN ripped it from the exclusive preserve of print papers and magazines with its 24 hour cable TV news and other news networks followed. Following this, the internet came along and news became commoditized. Anyone could report anything on their own (Facebook, Instagram, WordPress), and anyone could publish on community publications like Medium and Reddit.
Since then, trust in news sources has plummeted. Today only a quarter of Americans trust the media. The highest level of trust (58%) is with national news and the lowest with social media news. Yet nearly half of Facebook users source their news from the platform.
As a result newspapers got squeezed. In the US in 2020 employees in the newspaper industry numbered 30,820 workers, less than half the 74,410 in 2006. Sadly, the employment number has fallen every year since then. Pew reports in 2020 a third of all newspapers had laid off employees compared to 24% in 2019. In addition, at 55%, larger newspapers (Sunday circulation greater than 250,000) were more likely to have layoffs than smaller newspapers.
And newspapers keep closing.
According to a report from Poynter, with the pandemic, 85 local newsrooms in America were permanently shut. According to Penny Abernathy, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, these closures follow a grim trend. Since 2004, there have been about 1,800 newspapers that have been shut down, most of them (1,700) were weeklies. Since 2004 on average 100 newspapers have been closing each year. There are now around 7,000 newspapers still publishing, a large majority (over 80%) being weeklies that are located primarily in small and rural areas with a circulation under 15,000.
Local newspapers are dropping like dodo’s. In the US two thirds of counties no longer have a daily newspaper! Barren (not Barrons) indeed. 200 of them have no local newspapers at all. Half the counties have only one newspaper - usually weekly. The loss of newspapers equates to a cavernous loss of community information and opposing perspectives which are sorely needed in a divided political landscape. Without it you get, well, less than genius policies squeaking through the abyss. A bit like Liz Truss.
Print circulation across the board keeps dropping - by around 5% per annum and digital subscriptions and adverts, while holding things together, for now, are not enough to make up for the steady decline. As a result newspaper owners keep consolidating. And consolidation can remove choice, talent and ultimately concentrate too much media control into too few hands.
Hands of slight?
The 25 largest US publishers’ control about one-third of all newspapers, up from 20% in 2004 including two thirds of all daily newspapers. Half of all newspapers have changed ownership in the past fifteen years. The ten largest newspaper owners control half the daily papers in the country. Spelling potential death spirals for the industry.
Things have got so bad that the US government is considering legislation to provide subsidies for the local news industry and its consumers.
What?
As local news wilted readers naturally turned to social media news with all its lack of regulations, quality and fact checking. A place where fake news and extreme views can reach further and faster than ever before.
The polarisation of news has become quite widespread in the western world, with the US and the UK having the worst of it, and parts of Northern Europe less so. But the perception of polarisation in news has been increasing in various countries across the world. It could be that as new digital news outlets emerge they increase this polarisation. After all, it can be easier to drive clicks with extreme positions than factual, balanced long reads. Which is hack for, if in doubt scream it out!
There is growing concern that the continued trend toward hollowing out of news rooms and quality journalists could permanently and irrevocably erode cultural and political information.
National media has not fared much better than local news. UK national newspaper sales have fallen by nearly two-thirds over the last two decades, according to analysis of ABC circulation data by Press Gazette.
The figure shows the extent of the devastation that digital disruption has wrought on the traditional print-centric newspaper business model. In January 2000, 16 daily and Sunday paid-for national newspapers had a combined circulation of 21.2 million, according to ABC figures.
Within ten years this had fallen to 16.4 million among 17 newspapers – now including the Daily Star Sunday, which launched in 2002 – representing a drop of nearly a quarter. According to the latest circulation figures available, the same group of newspapers sold a total of 7.4 million copies – a fall of 55% within ten years.
To navigate this terminal decline the industry has had to resort to increasingly desperate measures - clickbait, dark arts and gossip gradually replacing real news. Headlines can be somewhat removed from the story - who cares what the story is so long as someone clicks into the article. Headlines sell papers baby! Mind you, the majority of supposed ‘news’ is press releases penned by corporate PR people and not journalists who, at best, only have time for a bit of light editing.
And yet it feels like we have to pay more for news today with a growing number of newspapers adding online paywalls. Some charging a small fortune - thank you FT! More than two-thirds of leading newspapers (69%) across the EU and US are operating some kind of online paywall, a trend that has increased since 2017, especially in the US where this has increased from 60% to 76%. A fifth of Americans pay for news today with the most paid for topic being international news.
However, fears about paywalls limiting access to online news can be a little ‘overblown’, according to a study of over 200 news outlets across seven countries, with hard paywalls that completely restrict access to non-fee payers being very rare. With almost all television organisations and digital-born media offering free access to online news, a majority of all news outlets studied are available at no cost.
And yet something seems to be broken - beyond repair?
The quality, openness and balanced choice of news sources seems to be declining. Perhaps the entire model needs to be turned upside down. After all, the cost of producing news in the current mode does not seem to quite add up. And death by a thousand cuts is still ‘certain death’.
Perhaps there could be a new approach - fusing the best of citizen journalism with all the benefits of professional journalism. With boots on the ground getting funded in an entirely different way.
After all generation Z, who are growing up fast and permeating most workplaces, are not attached to traditional news media like their predecessors. They get their news from their connections on Telegram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and TikTok. They are in tune with fragmented media from all kinds of disparate news sources, formal and informal - so long as it is digital. Step aside New York Times!
The printing press probably needs to get dumped once and for all so that 100% of the industry’s increasingly cash constrained investments and focus can go into the future - which is digital. Newspapers, like news networks should probably figure out how to provide mixed media content for the news they provide their subscribers - articles, podcasts, TV and even games. And make it more informal and communal - you know, a bit less like working in the civil service while watching the BBC.
According to Statista, News consumption among audiences in the United States now most commonly occurs online, with social media the go-to option for many. In fact, data from a 2021 survey found that close to 48 percent of U.S. adults used social media for news often or semi-regularly. Using social networks to keep up to date is a habit often associated with Gen Z and millennials, but this is changing. Now, older consumers are also demonstrating a preference for social platforms over legacy news media.
Before we step into the metaverse and things get really messed up, the news organisations of today will have to get up to speed with the current technologies. For national news organisations that means completing the transition to paid subscribers behind a paywall. For local news providers it means consolidating around advanced digital platforms with wider capabilities.
As mobile phones and tablets become ever more powerful anyone can capture news at source, and someone will figure out how to better organise, pay for and distribute these micro news opportunities. A citizen journalist producing intriguing content still needs to get paid and pronto. At the same time, professional freelance and independent journalists are seeking greater independence. The combination could prove to be quite powerful.
And as machine intelligence continues to advance, alongside new payment systems and mechanisms - new revenue streams could open up. The tokenization of content has just begun. And pay per article and advanced, auto news bundling will likely emerge.
Perhaps the newspaper publisher of tomorrow will be skinnier than ever - utilising advanced technologies, payment methods and content advances such as gaming, AI and the metaverse in ways we could not have imagined before. These techno news operations might be less a place for full time journalists to write and more a place designed to source, combine and package outsourced content from an endless spigot of structured news that flows into the editorial teams from all kinds of places - meta-tagged like a firefly on crack!
So long as these new advances make news more accurate, inclusive, community driven, local, timely and cost efficient then there is hope. If new approaches also make news less partisan and more open - then the most worrying of all trends - which is the concentration of ever more news in fewer, perhaps more sinister hands - could change once and for all.
News drives community and informed, educated citizens. It also spurs politics, perspective and conversation. Some believe that it is the lifeblood of society. Surely our news is due a major reinvention. This time with the journalist, the creator and the reader at its core.
Perhaps we should call time on old fashioned news from ageing news barons squeezing out the last bit of profit, partisanship and gossip for the highest bidder, driving us into an endless cycle of inertia and introspection.
