Content Hub News Items

How to...Create a News Item - Legacy

Kelly Hansen — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 12:55:41 +0000

How to...Create a News Item - Legacy Kelly Hansen Tue, 07/26/2022 - 08:55

Watch News Item Video Tutorials

View an Example Optimized News Item

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May 8, 2023
How to...Create a News Item - Legacy
July 26, 2022
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April 28, 2022
How to...Use the Blockquote Style to Format a Fact Box
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How to...Topic Tag and Share a News Item
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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

^{Pro Tip:}
Use a meta tag previewer to see how your News Item appears in search engine results and on social media platforms.

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’

^{Pro Tip:}
Headings - H2, H3, H4, H5 - help people and search engines find, read, and organize the information on a page. Correctly formatted headers will improve a page's accessibility, usability, and SEO.

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

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

^{Pro Tip:}
Prefer video tutorials? Watch the News Item video playlist.

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

^{Pro Tip:}
To generate unformatted copy, use a Word ‘Clean Up’ tool OR compose the News Item in the Grammarly app, then copy in the clean, ready-to-format text.

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’.

^{VIP - Very Important Point:}
After publishing, the News Item is queued for export to the selected subscribing site. The News Item is viewable by the public within 15 minutes, after exporting to the subscribing site.

Complex formatting, multiple images, or long export queues during busy creation times may cause export slightly longer export times.

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!

Waited an hour? News Item not exporting? Please report an issue!

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Content Hub News Items

How to...Use the Blockquote Style to Format a Fact Box

Kelly Hansen — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 15:48:57 +0000

How to...Use the Blockquote Style to Format a Fact Box Kelly Hansen Fri, 04/08/2022 - 11:48

Keep Mason accessible with expressive alt text

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How to...Create a News Item - Legacy
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Blockquote styling is the unsung, and versatile, hero of a reader-friendly page or news item.

If you aren’t using the blockquote styling feature to add a visual POP to news items and pages, you should be! Use the blockquote styler with the attribution line to highlight a compelling quote. Or, create a fact box, like the one below, by formatting a bulleted list within a blockquote.

Tips to Improve Readability:

List the sizzle and key facts
Use concise language, short sentences
Break up articles with intro text, headers, fact boxes, and smaller images
Place large images and videos at the end

Watch the video below shows how to create a fact box in less than 26 seconds using the blockquote style. The same instructions apply to a text block placed on a landing or basic page.

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Content Hub Programs

How to...Optimize Pages and News Items for Social Sharing

Kelly Hansen — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 22:58:20 +0000

How to...Optimize Pages and News Items for Social Sharing Kelly Hansen Thu, 03/10/2022 - 17:58

View a Sample Optimized News Article

Use Correct Image Sizes

More About News Items

How to... Login to Content Hub
May 8, 2023
How to...Create a News Item - Legacy
July 26, 2022
How to...Optimize Pages and News Items for Social Sharing
April 28, 2022
How to...Use the Blockquote Style to Format a Fact Box
April 8, 2022
How to...Topic Tag and Share a News Item
March 10, 2022

Always expect news items to be shared on social media.

Add a custom summary text and a thumbnail to every page, profile, and news item to improve brand impact, social engagement, as well both external and internal search engine ranking (SEO). The thumbnail and summary text display as the page's social media card and search result preview snippet.

This page's thumbnail and summary text in action.

Guide to Adding Summary Text and Thumbnail

Summary text and thumbnail images are added on the ‘Edit Settings’ screen
The thumbnail and summary text combine to become the page's search result and social media card preview snippet
The summary text should be a one-sentence highlight of the article
The thumbnail image should be an informative visual illustration of the summary text
Thumbnail images should be square (1:1 ratio) images, with minimum dimensions of 300x300 pixels and maximum dimensions of 600x600 pixels
Use a social media previewer such as OpenGraph

Even if you have no distribution plans of your own, web content is highly shareable. One can’t predict which stories will be shared by your readers.

Dr. Washington avidly promotes Mason on social media, he may be sharing your story!

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Best Practices Tutorial

News Item Tutorial

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Content Hub News Items

How to...Topic Tag and Share a News Item

Kelly Hansen — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 22:10:29 +0000

How to...Topic Tag and Share a News Item Kelly Hansen Thu, 03/10/2022 - 17:10

More How tos...

How to... Login to Content Hub
May 8, 2023
How to...Create a News Item - Legacy
July 26, 2022
How to...Optimize Pages and News Items for Social Sharing
April 28, 2022
How to...Use the Blockquote Style to Format a Fact Box
April 8, 2022
How to...Topic Tag and Share a News Item
March 10, 2022

Sharing and Tagging make the 'add once, view all over' Content Hub magic happen!

News Items added to Content Hub will appear on subscriber site(s) they are shared with
Topic tags assigned to a news item determine which filtered lists it will display once the item exports to a subscribing site

In this video example, a news item is shared and tagged to appear on Mason's President's Site 'Statements' page.

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News Item Tutorial

Content Hub News Items

How to... Login to Content Hub

Kelly Hansen — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 17:49:51 +0000

How to... Login to Content Hub Kelly Hansen Mon, 11/22/2021 - 12:49

SiteMasonry's distributed content library, Content Hub, allows editors to add and share stories, profiles, and program descriptions to SiteMasonry sites.

To login to Content Hub:

In a web browser window, go to: https://content.sitemasonry.gmu.edu/user/login
Click 'Login with your Mason Credentials'link to be taken to Mason's standard login screen.
Enter your MasonID and password, and approve the 2-Factor authentication check.
You should be returned to the website's homepage once done. Click 'Content' in the admin navigation bar (top left) to get to the Content List.

News Item Tutorials

How to... Embed an Image with Expressive Image Alt Text
May 9, 2023
How to... Login to Content Hub
May 8, 2023
How to… Understand Versioning and Publication States - Draft, Published, and Archive
May 2, 2023
How to... Add Files to Blackboard and Find the Web Permalink
April 25, 2023
How to...Create a News Item - Legacy
July 26, 2022

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Content Hub News Items

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