How to Set Up WordPress and Medium Distribution in LettsNews
To set up WordPress and Medium distribution in LettsNews you need to add two pieces of information to enable LettsNews to auto-distribute to your selected medium page or wordpress blog. LettsNews provides distribution to a number of different channels. Soon we will be adding promotion to social media sites as well.
To add distribution channels to LettsNews click Profile in 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
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 add 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 Medium distribution you need to insert your username and your Integration Token. To get your Integration Token follow these steps:
Go to your medium page 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 insert 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.
To gather, publish and distribute news faster than you thought possible, sign up to LettsNews for free at lettsnews.com.
Newsroom Tech for Everyone - Sign Up Now!
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.
