LocalPress | Platform Documentation

For Subscribers

As a Subscriber, LocalPress is your window into the news that matters most to your daily life. The platform puts you in control of what you see, filtering out the noise to focus on your specific community.

Dynamic Geographic Filtering: Personalize your news feed by setting your precise location. The "Hyper-Local Stack" allows you to drill down from State and County news, all the way to your Town Municipality and specific School District.
Source Transparency: Unlike traditional news platforms, LocalPress features a "View the Sources" option on articles. You can directly view the public records, PDFs, or audio clips used to verify claims in the story.
Account Portal: Easily manage your geographic preferences, saved articles, and notification settings directly from your reader portal.
Syndicated Discovery: Experience seamless LocalPress content embedded across other community sites, like your municipal homepage or Chamber of Commerce, bringing the news directly to where you already are.

For Reporters

The Reporter suite is designed to streamline the research, writing, and verification processes, acting as a professional "Backstage" content authoring environment.

Rich Text Editor: A collaborative, distraction-free authoring interface optimized for long-form reporting, embedding media, and formatting text seamlessly.
Geographic Tagging: Mandatory location tagging ensures your story is placed directly into the correct local feed, maximizing visibility for the right audience.
The Source Vault: A secure sidebar utility where you upload primary evidence (PDFs, images, or audio). These sources can be directly mapped to claims in your article to verify your reporting.
Draft Workflow: Work at your own pace with auto-saving drafts. Once completed, your articles are seamlessly submitted to the Newsroom Editors Queue for final review.

For Newsroom Editors & Administrators

Editors and Administrators are the guardians of quality and platform health, ensuring newsrooms operate smoothly while maintaining the highest editorial standards.

Editorial Capabilities

Review Queue: A dedicated pipeline to review submitted articles for journalistic integrity, tone, and accuracy before they go live.
Verification Gate: Verify the Reporter's uploaded files in the Source Vault against the claims made in the text. Editors have the authority to make sources public for readers, or keep sensitive documents hidden.
Publishing & Distribution: Control the final release of content to the network, including cross-syndicating to other jurisdictions when applicable.

Administrative Tools

Newsroom Dashboard: Monitor all ongoing operations, tracking article statuses from draft to published, all in one bird’s-eye view.
Access Control: Manage the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system. Assign members to their roles (Reporters, Editors) and uphold organization security.
Geographic Nodes: Configure the specific geographic boundaries—from states to school districts—that your virtual newsroom covers.

Content Syndication & Distribution

LocalPress is designed as a centralized content command center. The syndication features let verified local journalism travel across platforms while maintaining its core journalistic integrity.

Cross-Platform "Push": Seamlessly distribute content from the Newsroom directly to managed social channels, ensuring high-quality previews and automatic backlinks to the primary source.
Embedding via Feed Widget: Export curated, hyper-local news feeds using an embeddable widget. Municipal websites or community partners can display verified news natively on their own pages.
Subscriber Sharing: Easily generate "Share Links" and verified snippets of articles to promote grassroots, user-driven distribution.
AI & Search Optimization: Articles are structured with advanced semantic metadata to ensure search engines and AI assistants reliably index verified local information.