Adding a News Item to Mercury

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Preparatory Steps

Log In and Choose Your Group

After logging in to Mercury, your first step to enter content is to select the appropriate group in Groups > My groups

Once your group is selected, you will be given numerous options to create content.

Beware of Copy and Paste!

Microsoft Word and some other applications use several characters that do not work well on the Web. Common examples are ampersands (&), angled quotes (single and double) and long dashes (en and em dashes).

For most long fields in Mercury, you can get around the vast majority of these issues by clicking on the paste from word button. However, this button is not available for short text fields without an Editor Toolbar (particularly of note: Title, subtitle, summary sentence and any field that might contain a name with apostrophes. If you cut and paste from Word into these fields, you may want to re-type any punctuation from the pasted text as a precaution. Another approach is to put your text into a plain text program first (Notepad for PC or Text Edit for Mac) and copy and paste into Mercury from there.

Sharing With Georgia Tech News and Research Publications

Please see the guidelines for sharing news with the main Georgia Tech News Site or the Research Horizons Site if you are preparing this news item to be shared with either group.

Create Your News Item

Select Create News or Create External News

Required Fields

Title

Your news item might be shown in places other than your website. So, choose a Title that:

  • clearly explains what your news item is about to a general audience (try to highlight the most important thing about it).
  • is self-explanatory even when not on YOUR website.
  • is concise, around eight words, so it doesn’t run over when feeding into other places across various websites.
  • has a catchy or informative headline that will inspire the reader to actually read your news story. 
  • you will not need to change, as changing the title cause duplicates on the news site or break links to this story.

Summary Sentence

  • Provide information that adds to the information already given in the Title, and use only 10 to 12 words at most.
  • This will show up on gatech.edu's GT News feed (if you share with their group).
  • This often displays below the headline, so don’t be repetitive.

Summary

This appears in the news feed the day your news item occurs. Your summary should be one to two sentences in length, and can expand a bit from the Summary Sentence.

You may also use the same copy from the Summary Sentence — these two never show up at the same time. Be aware that this does not fill the main body space on the news item listing itself; the Body field will do that.

Dateline

These fields auto-populate with today’s date; leave as is.

Contact

If someone has questions, who can answer them? Or, who’s the author? 

Include that person’s name, email address, and phone number.

Groups

If you want this article to show up in multiple places, select all the relevant groups.

The news sites where this item will show up. Your group (example: "Office of Awesome") will automatically be chosen. As appropriate, you might also get permissions to share your news item with other groups (perhaps an affiliated School or Department). This allows you to syndicate the content to other sites.

Save as...

Change the workflow from “Draft” to “Published” so that your item shows up in news feeds.

Unless you’re not finished, in which case, save as a Draft to come back to publish it later.

Recommended Fields

Body

You can give a fuller description of the news item here. It can have lots of details, and multiple paragraphs are allowed. Avoid leaving the Body section blank. 

This section should provide information about the news item itself, such as whether it’s part of a series, activities that will take place at the news item, or context of why a speaker is relevant to campus. If you are copying and pasting text, refer to the “Beware copy and paste” note above. Hyperlink websites in your text (e.g., if your text reads “clough.gatech.edu,” make sure that text is clickable). For longer URLs, hyperlink words to the website so the URL is not messy within the news item link (e.g., for a long application link, use the words “Apply online,” and hyperlink those words to the application URL). Be as specific as possible, but know that you can link to other pages for more information (such as agendas, directions, or speaker bios).

Related Links

Drop this area down and include any relevant websites — perhaps any organizations/Schools/Units associated with the story. 

Repeat important links from the Body section here to make sure readers can find the information.

Category

The goal of these tags is to make your news item easier to find on OTHER news sites (especially the very large Newsroom site). Choose the category that best fits your news item. To select multiple categories, hold down the “Control” (ctrl) key while clicking each applicable category.

Keywords

These help your news item be associated with others that are about the same thing, and it also can be used to feed websites. Make sure you spell words correctly, place commas correctly, and try to use keywords that auto-populate as you type so you’re not creating too many new ones.

Commas will separate each keyword, so some things may need to be altered to work as keywords (e.g., “School of Literature, Media and Culture” should be entered without commas, or else it will be processed as “School of Literature” and “Media and Culture.”)

Core Research Areas

If your news applies to one of the Core Research Areas, check the corresponding boxes accordingly. Your selections here should match those in the “Category" and "Keywords” sections. 

Optional Fields

Subtitle

Give a little more detail than what's in the Title, and do not repeat the Title.

Media

Either upload an image here, or else scroll down in the pop-up window and type in the title of any image or video you have previously uploaded. Results will populate as you begin to type.

File attachments

This is an opportunity to attach files that do not fit into the image or video category, such as a PDF application, guidelines, or reports. However, this requires the user to download a file to be able to view it (unlike photos or videos items), so make sure anything you’re attaching here is worth the user’s time to download. News item flyers are generally better included as images rather than attachments.