There are occasions when there is breaking news and there isn't necessarily a story to accompany the headline. It would be useful to be able to create an alert in which we could write the desired alert text in and publish it directly, without having to create a story and include it in the Alert Bar Collection in WebSked.
With this in mind, it would also be useful to have a toggle available in the Alert Bar Block that would allow us to opt in or opt out of including a link to a story. In the event that we only include free form text in the alert, we could toggle off the option to include a link to a story.
JoAnn Debo
Thanks JoAnn for the idea. We'll keep this in the Future Consideration category to see if we get feedback from others on the usefulness of this feature. A couple reasons why we don't currently offer this, as context:
For the Alert Bar to support multisite, the alert text needs to be written outside of PageBuilder Editor. (To put it another way, if this text were to be written directly in the Custom Fields of the Alert Bar Block, that text would appear across all websites, which newsrooms typically do not want – breaking news in one market may not be worthwhile breaking news in others. But by using Collections, editors can have their alert text appear on only one website, since there is a Collection per website).
The best practices we've seen from the Washington Post newsroom and some others is to start by creating a Composer file for the story first, even if the article body only contains the breaking news alert text and perhaps a message saying "This developing story will be updated." Then, the alert bar, email alerts, native app alerts, social media posts, etc. can all link to that story – and as the newsroom is able to, they update that story file. All the traffic is sent to the right place from the beginning, rather than sending users to the homepage.