Today sees us roll-out Temporary Editorial Instructions to all our customers – and Charlie is sending hundreds of users emails as we speak. Splendid! I am personally super thrilled to see us continue to expand in this Editor Friendly direction – and cement our status as the most sophisticated and powerful front page programming tool for publishers in the world today.

Temporary Editorial Instructions have been designed so the Editor can communicate with the Platform.

Take Larry, the Editor in charge for the home page. We see him push the “Dutch roof collapse” story into a prominent Feature1 position in the morning, but as the day evolve we start recommending that the “News of the World” story goes into Feature1. For very valid reasons, a regional tie in, Larry is not ready to move this story just yet, so he tells the engine to snooze on the “News of the World” story for the next 30 minutes, and allow us to: a) come back with the recommendation for this story in this position if it still resonates with the readership and b) put the story back into circulation, so we can recommend the second most optimal placement for it.

This is where algorithmic and generally Data Driven Editorial instructions really have the opportunity to add a lot of value – assuring that the editor-in-chief can set the tone and apply a set of guidelines that are always kept by his team of editors. Such as the following example of persistent editorial instructions which work perfectly in conjunction with the temporary and very much in the moment editorial instructions:

• We must promote at least 60% local stories on the front page at any given point in time
• We must use a story with picture material for position 1, 2 and 3
• We cannot show content in the top carousel older than 16 hours
• We cannot have more than 3 stories from the entertainment category above the fold
• We cannot have a gallery in the hero spot
• We cannot use more than 30% AP stories

Exciting isn’t it!? If you are not yet a customer, you are more than welcome to connect directly and we can setup a chat.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)