Ideas for Arc Publishing

As a newsroom admin, I get requests about twice a week to create a new story template for something that would be useful to only a couple of people.  A template would save these people a lot of time and repetitive, wasted work.  But I typically have to decline these requests because the number of story templates is already unwieldy and makes it difficult for users to find what they need.

Here are three different ideas that would address this problem:

• Allow admins to organize or nest templates by topic -- i.e. Columnists, Newsletters, Alternative story formats, Series, etc.
• Allow users to "Favorite" the templates they use and either hide or demote the rest in their template picker (similar to the favoriting system on the Arc home dashboard)
• Enhance Ellipsis settings to allow a more robust show/hide option -- so that I could specify "Show" only to specific user roles (i.e. editor, producer, audience, columnist, reporter.)
  • This idea could also be tied to author service, so that any given template could be shown only to the author(s) whose names are attached to the template in the Author field.