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How Inbox Works

Editors' email inboxes are flooded every day with badly-formatted community submissions. Inbox turns that flood into a community pipeline: one clear way for businesses, PR reps, and community members to reach local newsrooms, delivering structured material editors can search, use, and track.

The pipeline connects two kinds of participants: Organizations that have news to share, and newsrooms that decide whether to cover it.

Organizations and Newsrooms

An Organization is the sender: a business, a public relations firm, a nonprofit, a government office, or any other group that wants to get news in front of local editors. An Organization has a public profile (name, website, contact details, a verified mailing address) and a team of member accounts. Team members either own the Organization (they can manage its profile and invite teammates) or contribute to it, writing and distributing submissions.

A newsroom is the receiver. Newsrooms on Inbox are Outlets on Wire, Plucky's story-sharing platform, and press releases arrive in a dedicated Paid Content tab inside the Wire search pages their editors already use, directly in the editorial workflow, not in a flooded email inbox.

One relationship matters more than any other:

Distribution is not publication

When you distribute a press release, it is delivered to the newsrooms you selected, placed in front of their editors in a searchable, downloadable format. Editors then decide, story by story, what to cover. Paying to distribute never guarantees that any outlet will publish anything. Newsrooms never approve or reject your release before it reaches them; it simply arrives, the way email does, but as structured material editors can search, use, and track.

Submission Types

A press release is one of several submission types an Organization can send:

  • Press release: a standard announcement distributed to newsrooms
  • Media opportunity: an invitation for press to attend or cover something
  • Op-ed: an opinion piece offered for publication
  • Financial report: a required or voluntary financial disclosure
  • Sponsored content: paid content, always labeled "Sponsored" for editors and readers
  • Event (coming soon): community events will have their own calendar-based flow

All current types move through the same compose-review-distribute steps as a press release.

The Life of a Press Release

Every submission moves through the same broad phases:

graph LR
    A[Draft] --> B[In review]
    B -->|passed| C[Ready to distribute]
    B -->|needs revisions| A
    C --> D[Distributed]
    D --> E[Newsrooms read,<br>download, cover]
  1. Draft. You write the release in a step-by-step wizard: content, media attachments, contacts, and an optional embargo. Drafts are private to your Organization and can sit unfinished as long as you like.
  2. Review. When you submit, the release is checked before it can be distributed (see Review below). A release that needs revisions comes back to you with specific findings; fix them and resubmit.
  3. Distribution. Once review passes, you choose target newsrooms on a coverage map, see the price for each one up front, accept the legal agreement, and distribute.
  4. Distributed. The release appears in each target newsroom's Paid Content tab, and on a public press-release page you can link to from your own channels. From here you track engagement, and can correct, retract, or archive the release.

An embargo (a hold-until date and time) travels with the release. Editors can see an embargoed release coming but cannot download it until the embargo lifts.

Review: Automated and Manual

Before a release can be distributed, it passes through review. What that looks like depends on the newsroom partner whose Inbox site receives it:

  • Automated review (Inbox's custom AI reviewer) checks the release in minutes for safety problems, editorial quality, and search-engine optimization, then either passes it, often with optional suggested improvements, or returns it with specific findings to fix. Most submissions get this.
  • Manual review applies when the receiving newsroom partner reviews submissions by hand. Your release waits in their queue until a person approves it or returns it with notes. You are notified either way.

Review is about quality and safety, not gatekeeping the news: its job is to make sure everything you send is easy for editors to actually use. A release that is clearly written, accurate about its own claims, and properly formatted passes.

Pricing

Each newsroom sets its own price for receiving a press release: a per-outlet price, and optionally a group price for reaching a whole network at once. You always see the exact price of every target before you commit to anything. Organizations doing public-service work (such as nonprofits or government offices) can also request a permanent fee exemption from individual newsrooms.

A Note for Beta Testers

During the beta, Inbox is free to use: submitters aren't charged to distribute, newsrooms pay nothing to receive, and no payment step runs. Targets show a "Free during beta" badge instead of a price. We plan to enable payments after we fine-tune the platform and confirm with newsrooms how they want to offer this service to their communities.

What Newsrooms Do with Your Release

Editors work from the Paid Content tab on Wire, where they can search and filter releases, preview them in a clean editorial layout, download the text and media for use in their coverage, bookmark releases for later, and subscribe by RSS. Two actions come back to you as the sender:

  • Correction requests. An editor who spots a problem can send your Organization a correction request describing what needs fixing. You respond by publishing a corrected version (see How to Correct, Retract, or Archive a Press Release).
  • Reports. Editors can report an Organization that misuses the platform. Reports go to Plucky's platform administrators, and repeated misuse can lead to suspension.

Newsroom-Run Inbox Sites

Some newsrooms operate their own branded Inbox site, their own community pipeline: a submission portal under their own name (and optionally their own domain) that gives local businesses, PR reps, and community members one clear way to reach them. These pilot newsrooms configure their site's branding and pricing, decide between automated and manual review, and can distribute received submissions across their own network. If you submit through a newsroom's branded site, everything in the submitter guides works the same way; only the name and logo on the page differ.

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