Newshub 2.8: Improving Efficiency and User Experience

We’ve been working hard on some major updates to Superdesk Newshub. Since our last post, here’s an overview of the improvements leading up to version 2.8, which is packed with enhancements designed to improve user experience, and simplify and speed up workflows.

Here’s a detailed look at what’s new in Newshub 2.8:

Configurable Homepage

One of the important new features is the ability to configure a user’s homepage, providing more control over their dashboard. In the past, the dashboard setup was determined by the owner of the Newshub instance and applied to all users. Now, users can create personalised dashboards based on their saved searches, called “My Topics,” allowing them to prioritise the topics most important to them.

News-Archive Switch

Newshub 2.8 has also introduced a “News-Archive Switch” functionality to better accommodate users with older content. While Newshub is originally designed to focus on recent news, some of our clients wished to use it as a full archive of their news organisation's work. This posed a challenge to system performance, as loading long lists of content slowed things down for users who only needed recent news.

With the introduction of the “News-Archive Switch,” users can now choose a custom date range for their content. The default setting presents items from the previous 30 days, but for those who require older content, there are options to access archives ranging from 14 days to 2 years, or going back decade by decade, using the time frame option. This improvement speeds up access for users while still accommodating those who need to search older archives.

“The benefit is that the delivery of the news is much faster, where somebody is interested in actual news and not in archived news. The archive still remains accessible for those who want to research news from long ago ,” said Gideon Lehmann, a Sourcefabric project manager.

This feature was co-financed by two news agency clients, The Canadian Press and STT, the Finnish news agency, showing how collaboration can bring valuable improvements to the open-source platform for only half the cost.

Agenda Sorting Options

Newshub’s Agenda feature always allowed sorting by date. For the STT news agency’s customers, it was important to see what had been recently changed or updated on their events. In response to their suggestion, we’ve now added a possibility to sort events by the most recent updates. This makes it easier for users to keep track of changes in ongoing coverage, especially when tracking long-term events.

In addition to sorting by date, users can now filter by newest updates, oldest updates, or relevance. The relevance sorting takes into account factors such as how often a keyword appears in an article, giving users the ability to track the most relevant updates in real-time.

Company Admin Updates

A major enhancement in this new version of Newshub is the introduction of the company admin role. This feature gives news organisations more control over managing access for users within their organisation. Here’s how it works: users can allocate a specific number of seats for various products based on agreement with their clients, allowing the company admin to control who has access to what content. Company admins can assign these available seats to their clients, monitor usage, and manage user access without needing to rely on agency support. This feature can be integrated into news producers’ customer relationship management systems, making the process even easier.

Azure SSO Integration

We’ve developed integration with Azure, a single sign-on (SSO) authentication scheme, for an improved, faster login process. Azure can be used by news agencies to enable their customers to use this single sign-on. This allows news agencies to set up the SSO based on Azure for internal use or for their customers, managing the setup by themselves.

When an agency uses Azure SSO, the type of user can be determined as “Internal” or as “Public.” Internal users get more detailed access to the news agency, while public users have the standard access level.

Labels for Top Stories

Finally, to further improve navigation and ensure that major stories and events are easy to find, we’ve introduced the “Top Story” label. Articles flagged as top stories in Superdesk are now marked in the agenda views in Newshub.

These new features are part of our ongoing efforts to make Superdesk Newshub more efficient and easier to use.

How can Sourcefabric's open-source tools improve your news organisation's performance? Get in touch to schedule a free demo.