Tutorials News
Tutorial · news sites and publishers
Thirty stories a day, posted on the day they matter.
Six steps, tuned for volume. The settings that matter here are the ones the other two tutorials leave alone: spread mode, a high rate limit, newest-first ordering and a freshness window that drops what missed its moment.
▶ Listen to this tutorial
Narrated, about two minutes.Prefer to read? The same words are written out below, step by step. Each step also has a Read aloud button that uses your browser's own voice.
What you will have at the end
One automation on a new Item appears, spread across your publishing window, draining newest first, dropping events older than a day.
The steps
Do them in order. Nothing publishes until you approve a post, so there is no step here that can surprise you.
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Point it at your CMS feed
Open Feeds and paste the RSS or Atom address WordPress, Ghost, Drupal or your own stack already emits. It is detected as a content feed. Stories are keyed by their feed id, so campaign parameters appended to your URLs never cause a re-post. Check the item count the preview reports against what you actually published today — if your feed is capped at the latest twenty items and you publish forty, the cap is the first thing to raise.
Tip. A feed that only carries the last hour of stories is fine. MagpieFeed polls on a schedule and remembers what it has already seen.
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Connect a channel
A newsroom usually wants publishing rather than Studio Mode. Connect a Facebook Page, an Instagram Business account, X, Telegram or Discord from Channels. Each card shows a health pill with the token's state and expiry, and a per-channel daily cap: the platform's own limit, respected by the scheduler independently of your automation's rate limit.
Tip. Connect the channels separately rather than one busy channel for everything. A token that expires on one should not take the whole desk offline.
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Set the house style
In Templates, choose an Article layout and set your masthead: logo, the two colours the paper actually uses, a typeface and a tone that suits a newsroom rather than a brand account. The lead image goes up top, the headline underneath. Preview it against a real story before you save — a masthead that works on a photo essay can vanish on a graphic.
Tip. Keep the tone plain. A caption for breaking news that sounds excited ages badly in about forty minutes.
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Build the automation for volume
Trigger a new Item appears. Schedule mode spread through the day from your first publishing hour, so posts are distributed across the window instead of stacking on two fixed slots. Raise the rate limit: a newsroom running thirty stories a day needs a per-day cap well above the default three, and the field accepts up to a hundred a day and twelve an hour. Set the freshness window to drop an item event older than a day so a quiet weekend does not become a Monday of stale headlines. Set the hold on each item short — a day or two is plenty when nothing is ever posted twice anyway.
Tip. Order matters at volume. Newest-first draining is what stops the queue becoming a backlog that posts yesterday's news one item an hour; the default picks it automatically for a content feed, and you can pin it explicitly.
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Work the queue at speed
Approval starts on I approve each post, and for a newsroom that means a fast pass rather than a slow one. Cards are ordered by their scheduled time. Approve the run, skip the ones an editor would not have sent, and fix only the captions that are actually wrong. Quiet hours in the schedule keep the overnight stories from firing at three in the morning; they wait for the window to open.
Tip. If the queue is consistently longer than your window can drain, the rate limit is too low or the freshness window is too long. Those two settings are the whole of queue management here.
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Go live, with an editor still in the loop
Switch to Publish on schedule when the queue has been right for a week. Automatic publishing is a setting, never the default — and you can run a split: the main wire feed automatic, a second automation on a sensitive section left on review. Exports stay available either way, as a ZIP pack, a Business Suite CSV or a calendar file for the social desk.
Tip. Keep the freshness window on even after you automate. It is the only setting that protects you from an outage turning into a flood of old headlines when the feed comes back.
The other walkthroughs
The same six steps, tuned for a different kind of feed.
Shops
Six steps, about ten minutes of real work. At the end a price drop in your feed becomes a branded, approved post — and you are the one who says yes to it.
Blogs
Six steps. At the end, every article you publish comes back as a branded card, and a second rule quietly recirculates the archive so a slow writing week is not a silent timeline.