The SNO Report: What’s new in Student News Source app?

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The Student News Source app is a kind of hub for student journalism, through which users can follow and read the news from their school’s student newspaper — or any student news site they choose. Combined, there are 188 student publications on the Student and College News Source apps, which have been downloaded nearly 10,000 times.

Since their unveiling last summer, we’ve made all kinds of improvements to the apps — many based on your feedback. When’s the last time you checked to make sure your app was up to date? Here’s a list of the most recent updates we’ve made:

  • You can now add pages — not only categories — to your mobile app menu, so long as the page (i.e. “About Us” or “Contact Us”) was created using the “Default” page template. Photos for that page will only show if they’re embedded within the text.

  • Users can subscribe to specific writers directly within the story page. They can view their subscriptions and unsubscribe from the Settings page.

  • Commenting on a story will now reflect however you set it up on the website. So, if you’ve turned comments off for a story online, all commenting icons and functions for that story in the app will not display.

  • If you’re paying for the Sports Center add-on, it is now available to use in the app and will show up as a menu option for users automatically. If for some reason you don’t want those features to show in the app, you can turn the option off in the mobile app settings area of your website’s dashboard. (Buy “Sports Center” as part of the Site Booster Bundle directly from your site’s dashboard.)

  • Story notifications will now be sent out even when publishing from the FLOW platform.

  • Custom menu icons can now be displayed in the menu on the app.

For further personalization of your app, here are a few tips for features that, while not necessarily new, you may have forgotten about:

  • Set your Splash Screen Image, which shows up when a user clicks on your school and shows any time that user opens the app in the future.

  • Set a Custom Header Image for the app. This will show when a user opens the menu bar for your publication; otherwise, it just shows text.

  • Set a Custom Mini Logo that shows up on the top part of the screen in the app.

We value your feedback. It’s your feedback that has helped us make many of these improvements, and there are a few things we’re still working on. Here’s a little preview of what’s coming to the apps:

  • Revamped analytics for story views and opened push notifications in the app

  • Ability to customize your app’s home screen and change the layout of the story lists with different thumbnail photo sizes

  • Ability to preset which tab opens up as the home screen. A user could choose to see “Recent” stories first, rather than a default category.

Don’t have the app but want it? Get the process going here.