Using the Oregon.gov NewsRoom Application

This article will provide an overview of the NewsRoom Application used by Oregon State Government Agencies to publish news releases for online consumption.

Document History

Ver. No.	Date	Author	Change
0.1	8/15	Shawn Amsberry	Doc.  Creation
1.0	8/15	Shawn Amsberry	Publish to GovSpace
1.1	5/21	Shawn Amsberry	Publish to Help Center
1.2	1/23	Shawn Amsberry	Update imagery for Tyler Technologies

Assumptions:

The directions in this document assume the following of its readers:

1. The reader has basic computing skills and knowledge and basic knowledge of common applications such as text editors and word processors and a general knowledge of using menu based commands such as copy, paste and copy shortcut.
2. The reader has a data.oregon.gov user account with ‘Edit’ permissions or greater.
3. The reader will abide by all applicable state or agency rules, guidelines and/or policies governing the use and display of appropriate content for display on Oregon.gov and its related websites.

Scope:

This article will provide an overview of the Oregon NewsRoom Application used by Oregon State Government Agencies to publish news releases for online consumption.

Overview

The NewsRoom application is used to enter information related to news releases that agencies need to publish online from time to time. The application works in concert with the News Release data set on Data.Oregon.Gov. The data set should only be directly edited by site administrators. All other users must use the NewsRoom application to enter and edit information related to their news releases.

Video

Can I use Newsroom for my agency?

Yes, the Newsroom application has only been released in a couple of agencies at the time of writing. To activate the news room for your agency, make a request here: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/ETS/EGOV/Pages/EGovChangeRequest.aspx

This change request will follow this basic path:

1. Agency makes the request for activation of the Newsroom app.
2. E-Gov establishes a staging location for the agency’s newsroom (it will take two to three days to establish this)
3. The agency will experiment and test in the staging environment and ask any questions they have about functionality.
4. The agency will let E-Gov know that they are ready for a production news room.
5. E-Gov will schedule a deploy of the live Newsroom environment and notify the agency of the expected day/time of deployment. It may take a couple of days to schedule.

Gaining Access to the NewsRoom Application

Access to the NewsRoom application is granted by the Oregon E-Government Service Desk by creating a ticket in the Service Desk Portal with the subject, “Request for access to NewsRoom App”. In the description field, you should include the agency you will be posting news releases for, the email address you used to set up your Data.Oregon.Gov account and a message from the Agency Website Single Point of Contact (SPOC), confirming your permission to post news articles for the agency. Alternatively, the Agency SPOC may make the request for another user including all the information mentioned for the new user.
The ability to post news articles to the Oregon NewsRoom application is dependent upon the poster having a data.oregon.gov account with Editor Permissions or greater. To obtain a Data.Oregon.Gov account, simply visit Data.Oregon.Gov and create an account using the link in the upper right that says ‘sign up’. Use your state email address (@state.or.us or @oregon.gov). Once you have an account, your manager will need to approve your Editor permissions and make the request to the service desk to have your account elevated to ‘Editor’.

Login to Oregon Newsroom

The Oregon Newsroom application can be found here: https://apps.oregon.gov/Application/Newsroom/Auth/Login
Your Data.oregon.gov log in credentials must be used to sign in.

This account is administered by Socrata, if you forget your username or password, please use the links on the log in page for assistance.

Upon login, single agency users will see a screen much like the one pictured to the right. Most users will only have permissions to post news releases for one agency. Notice the bottom of the page where the pagination index resides. This is a quick way to jump around in the list of news articles. By default, newer articles are displayed on the lower numbered pages. Changing the order by the column headings will change that.
If a user has permission to post news releases for more than one agency, the top of the application window will look like this one at right. Notice the ability to select which agency’s news releases to view.
Near the bottom of the page, there is a setting to choose how many records to view in a single page of the application.

Filter for a news article(s)

It is possible to reduce the number of news articles displayed in the window to easier find a specific article for edits.

While viewing the list of news articles: Click ‘Filter News Articles’ Choose ‘Filter by Date Range’
Enter a date range. These fields will respond to the formats: mm/dd/yyyy Month day, Year
The result of a filter will be a focused view on the date or date range specified. Notice this particular filtered view does not require pagination.
Just click the name of a news article to open it for viewing.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Return to Home’ to return to the list of agency news articles.
At any time the applied filter can be removed to go back to an unfiltered, or complete, view of the list of news articles.

Add a News Article

While viewing the list of news articles: Click ‘Add a New News Article’
Enter the fields as appropriate to the news article.
Article Content should contain all relevant information concerning the article including contact information if readers have questions.
To Create a link in the body of an article, a very specific format must be used.   The text of the link must be surrounded by square brackets [] and the URL of the link must be surrounded by parentheses () and immediately follow the text in square brackets.  See the example at right.	A link to Oregon.gov would be formatted as: Please see the [oregon.gov](https://www.oregon.gov) homepage for more information. If a link winds up at the end of a sentence, the period must reside inside the parentheses or there will be a space between the last character of the sentence and the period. Examples: Correct: We found the dog at the [Maxwell County Animal Shelter.](https://www.mcas.org) Incorrect: We found the dog at the [Maxwell County Animal Shelter](https://www.mcas.org).
Choose the appropriate categories that seem relevant to the content of the news release.
The Contacts field is inactive at the time of writing. This is a placeholder for a possible future enhancement. There is no time estimate or exact description available.
Photos may be selected by clicking in the Image area and browsing to images in your local drives, or by dragging and dropping from your local machine. Allowed file types may include: .jpg, .png, .gif or bitmapped. Images with transparent backgrounds will display as having a black background.
Videos – Enter the URL of the video on the streaming service you use. Videos used here must be located online somewhere like YouTube, Vimeo or similar. Video files themselves cannot be uploaded to the news article. Multiple videos may be entered by entering a URL, clicking Add and repeating. Video format is unimportant since this feature is essentially embedding a streamed resource. Be sure the video is marked as shared, or public on your streaming service.
Audio files may be attached. Success can be expected with .wav, .aiff and .mp3 files. These files may play in the browser or may be downloaded and play in a local player depending on the end viewers computer and internet settings. The behavior of these files cannot be forced in the end viewer’s environment.
Clicking ‘Submit’ saves the news article.

Delete a News Article

Ordinarily, a news article will simply be edited or corrected, rather than deleted. If a need arises for deleting a news article, contact the E-Gov Service Desk and make the request. The request will need to be affirmed by your agency Single Point of Contact (SPOC) before the deletion will take place.

Your Agency News Room

Once the newsroom is established for your agency, on your site, link to the Newsroom using this pattern of URL http://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/Pages/Agency.aspx?agency=DCBS replace the DCBS with your agency web acronym.

For the Department of Administrative Services, the URL would be: http://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/Pages/Agency.aspx?agency=DAS

For the Department of Transportation, the URL would be: http://www.oregon.gov/newsroom/Pages/Agency.aspx?agency=ODOT

At present, these will be dead links as the Newsroom has not been activated for DAS or ODOT.