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How to Build Your Audience of Editors

Grow your audience of editors with two optional steps: point editors to Plucky Wire from your website's republication page, or deliver your latest stories to their inboxes with a scheduled email digest. Neither is required, and they're independent of each other. You can do either one, both, or neither, in any order.

Looking for the digest settings themselves?

This page covers where the digest fits into growing your audience. For the field-by-field setup guide, see How to Set Up Email Digests.

Before You Begin

You will need:

  • An Outlet that shares stories in a Group (see How to Upload a Story)
  • For the republication-page option only: a republication page on your newsroom's website. This is the page that tells other newsrooms they're welcome to republish your stories and on what terms, sometimes called a reprint policy or republishing guidelines page.

Note

Checking the Edit Alerts toggle and setting up the email digest require Group administrator permission. Editing your republication page needs no Plucky Wire permission at all — if you're not an admin, make that change yourself and ask your Group administrator to handle the settings.

Instructions

The two options below are independent: each one works without the other, and neither is required.

Point Editors to Plucky Wire from Your Republication Page

If editors already visit your republication page to find out whether and how they can run your stories, that page is a natural place to let them know about Plucky Wire.

An editor's biggest worry about republished copy is often that the original gets corrected and nobody tells them, so we recommend highlighting the fix: stories pulled through Plucky Wire come with automatic edit alerts, email notifications sent whenever a story an editor downloaded is later corrected, clarified, or retracted.

  1. Before updating your site, confirm edit alerts are switched on for your Group in Plucky Wire. Go to Settings (https://wire.pluckyworks.org/settings/), select your Group from the sidebar, and open the General tab.

  2. In the Notifications section, check that the Edit Alerts toggle is ON. If it's off, turn it on and click Save & Refresh at the bottom of the Notifications card.

    The toggle is the Group-wide master switch; each downloading User still opts in to the emails from their own settings. For the full section, see How to Configure Group Settings → Configure Notifications.

  3. Open your republication page for editing in your website's content management system (CMS).

  4. Add a short section that names Plucky Wire and leads with edit alerts. Here's some simple copy you can adapt:

    Our stories are also available for republication for free through Plucky Wire
(https://wire.pluckyworks.org). Editors who pull our stories through Plucky Wire receive an
automatic email alert whenever we correct, clarify, or update a story. To learn more, 
please visit our page on Plucky Wire or email us at [your contact address].

  5. Publish the page.

Warning

Avoid pasting a signup link (the shareable registration URL from How to Manage Members) onto a permanent public page. Signup links expire — 7 days by default — so the page goes stale quietly, and anyone who finds the URL while it's live can join your Group without the normal verification flow. Save signup links for direct outreach to newsrooms you know.

Deliver Your Latest Stories with an Email Digest

If you want your latest stories reaching editors' inboxes without them having to remember to come looking, turn on the scheduled email digest. This is an automatic email to every User at every Outlet in your Group, with links to your latest stories. The digest stands on its own. You don't need to have touched your own site's republication page first.

  1. Go to Settings (https://wire.pluckyworks.org/settings/), select your Group from the sidebar, and click the Emails to Partners tab.

  2. Set a schedule and configure the content. Every field is documented in How to Set Up Email Digests.

  3. Turn the ON/OFF toggle next to Scheduled Email Digests to ON, then click Save Changes.

  4. Add prospective partners as Additional Recipients — editors whose newsrooms haven't joined Plucky Wire yet can still receive the digest (up to 300 outside addresses), see what your Group shares each week, and unsubscribe themselves at any time. See Manage Additional Recipients.

Tip

Many Groups schedule the digest for early morning (7:00 or 8:00 AM in their timezone) so it's waiting in editors' inboxes before morning planning meetings.

What Happens Next

Each option you set up works on its own timescale:

  • If you updated your republication page, editors who read it learn that pulling stories through Plucky Wire — instead of copying them from your site — earns them automatic edit alerts. The ones who follow up arrive through whatever door you gave them: your public profile link lets them request to join your Group directly, while a contact email lets you add their Outlet yourself.
  • If the Edit Alerts toggle is ON, editors whose newsrooms are in your Group receive an alert email whenever a story they downloaded is corrected, clarified, retracted, or taken down — as long as they've opted in from their own settings.
  • If you turned on the digest, every User at every Outlet in your Group, plus any additional recipients, receives it on the schedule you set. Outside recipients can unsubscribe with one click from the link at the bottom of the email.

Whichever you choose, expect gradual growth rather than a spike. Each correction that reaches a partner in time, and each digest that lands before a morning planning meeting, is one more reason for an editor to keep sourcing stories from your Group.

Next Steps

Troubleshooting

  • An editor's republished story was corrected, but they never got an alert: Work through three checks. The Edit Alerts toggle in your Group's Notifications settings must be ON. The editor must have downloaded the story through Plucky Wire — alerts can't reach someone who copied text from your website, which is exactly why your republication page should steer editors here. And the editor needs to have opted in to the alert emails from their own settings.

  • Editors visit Plucky Wire but can't find our Group: The public directory only shows Groups with Public Listing turned on. Check the Public Info section of your Group settings — or link editors straight to your Group's public profile link instead of the Plucky Wire homepage.

  • Partners say they aren't receiving the digest: See the Troubleshooting section of How to Set Up Email Digests.

  • Still stuck? Email support@pluckyworks.org, or ask any other administrator of your Group.