Getting started

Quick start guide

From application to your first story on the wire.

Prerequisites

Northwest Newswire is a closed network. Before anyone from your newsroom can sign in, your organization must be approved by the platform administrator. Approval is based on your newsroom's email domain — once approved, any staff member with a matching email address can create an account.

Step 1: Apply for organization approval

Submit your newsroom's application at /register/organization. You'll need:

Your newsroom's name
Your newsroom's website URL (e.g. https://example.com)
Your staff email domain (e.g. mail.example.com)
A contact email address for the application

Approval typically takes one business day. You'll receive an email when your organization is approved or if there are questions about your application.

Step 2: Create your account

Once your organization is approved, any staff member with a matching email address can sign up at /register. Enter your name and work email — the domain must match the one associated with your organization.

You'll receive an email with a 6-digit code. Enter it on the next screen to complete sign-up. The first user from your organization is automatically designated as admin. If your organization already has members, your account will require approval from an org admin before you can access the platform.

Step 3: Explore your dashboard

After signing in, you'll land in the story library — a browsable feed of all stories shared by member newsrooms. Your dashboard (accessible from the top navigation) is where you manage your organization's contributed stories and settings.

All users have access to Alerts under their account — configure keyword and org-follow alerts, plus a daily digest. If you're the admin for your organization, you'll also have access to:

Settings — Update your organization's profile
Members — Manage team access and pending approvals
Feeds — Connect an RSS or Atom feed for automatic story ingestion
Exclusions — Hide stories from specific publishers

Roles

There are two roles within an organization:

Admin — Can upload and manage stories, access all settings, manage feeds and alerts and see the full activity log. The first user from an org is automatically admin.
Editor — Can upload and manage stories and browse the library. Cannot access organization settings.

Membership expectations

Northwest Newswire is a reciprocal network. Members are expected to contribute at least as many stories as they republish from other member newsrooms — the wire is not a one-way distribution channel. Content shared to the wire should be publication-ready and of genuine interest to other member newsrooms.

Republication requirements

All stories on Northwest Newswire are shared under a common set of republication requirements. By republishing a story, your newsroom agrees to the following:

Attribution is required. The republished story must include a link back to the original on the originating newsroom's website. Do not remove or alter the attribution line.
Headlines may be adapted. You may edit the headline for style or to better fit your audience, but it must retain the original meaning.
Minor edits are acceptable. Small changes for style, updated time references (e.g. replacing “Wednesday” with a date) or minor clarifications are permitted. Do not alter facts, tone or conclusions.
Preserve the byline. The original author's name must appear exactly as written. Do not substitute your own staff name or remove the byline.
No resyndication. Do not redistribute this story to third parties or other publications.
Media is licensed for one-time use. Photos and video may be used only in connection with this story — including to promote it on social media — with credit to the creator and to the originating newsroom. Do not use assets for other stories or unrelated purposes.
Notify the originating newsroom. Submit your published URL after republishing so the originating newsroom can track where their story appeared.

Individual newsrooms may add requirements beyond these — those appear on the story detail page when present.

Next steps

Once you're signed in, the full platform documentation is available under Help in the navigation.