Here's what's new in Timepath this month. Voices can now collect more than photos, Data Story has line charts and searchable tables, and Social Story finally tells you whether a post actually went out.
We also brought the Design Studio to five more products and fixed a long list of smaller things. The three big ones are below, the rest is in our changelog.
Voices - quotes, video and a Reel feed
Until now, Voices was mostly about photos. Readers can now also answer a callout with a written response or a short video. Approved responses show up in your gallery: photos and videos as tiles, written responses as quote cards. If your Voices only asks for words, you can add a few quotes yourself before it goes live, so the first readers don't land on an empty page.
There's also a new layout called Reel: a vertical, full-screen feed that readers scroll through on your own site, with a button to add their own. And if you want to print a reader's photo, you can now switch on full-resolution originals, so Voices keeps the untouched file of every new photo.
Purpose: Collect the reactions your story gets, in whatever form readers want to send them.
Key Benefit: Photos, videos and written responses in one gallery, moderated in one place.
Example Use Cases:
A wall of reader quotes under a story about rising costs
A Reel of reader videos on your article page
A reader's photo printed at full size
A gallery that opens with a few quotes you picked yourself
Try it: open a Voices and add a text question.
Data Story - line charts, searchable tables and pasting data
Data Story could already do pie, bar and column charts. Now it can do line charts too, so you can show how something changed over time, with several lines in one chart. If a value is missing for a year, the line breaks there instead of dropping to zero.
There's also a new table block for bigger datasets. Readers can search and sort it themselves, even with thousands of rows, and the search ignores accents. Getting your data in is a lot quicker as well: paste it straight from Excel, Google Sheets or a Wikipedia table, or upload a CSV or XLSX file. You can add a source and a date, and they show underneath each chart and table.
Purpose: Go from a spreadsheet to a published data story in one sitting.
Key Benefit: Charts that show change over time, and tables too big for a chart.
Example Use Cases:
Two lines crossing, like approval and disapproval ratings
A searchable list of every school in your region
A table pasted from Wikipedia and published the same day
Polls or prices you update with a fresh paste
Try it: paste a table into a Data Story.
Social Story - see whether your post actually went out
When you sent a post from Social Story to your publishing partner, you couldn't see what happened next. Now you can. Under the Send button you'll find one line per platform: posted, still going out or failed, when it happened, a link to the live post, and the reason if a platform rejected it.
For breaking news, you can now publish straight away instead of sending a draft, once an admin has switched that on. By default it needs two different people to sign off, but your newsroom can decide one is enough. Posts can also go to your partner automatically when you set them to published, and an admin can approve an RSS automation to publish on its own. Anyone can switch it off again with one click.
Purpose: Know for sure whether your post went out, and where.
Key Benefit: A clear status for every platform, with a link to the post.
Example Use Cases:
Checking that a breaking news post reached every channel
Finding the link to a post a few days later
Seeing which platform rejected a post, and why
An RSS feed that is allowed to publish on its own, with a quick way to stop it
Try it: send a post and watch the status come in under the Send button.
Also new in August
Design Studio for Survey, Quiz, Voices, Liveblog and Data Story: you edit the design full-screen with a live preview, and save it all in one go.
Collection has five new looks to start from: Spotlight, Poster, Filmstrip, Magazine and Centre stage. Collections that play automatically now have a pause button.
Survey can show readers how others answered, on the thank-you screen. You switch it on per survey.
Liveblog can continue in a Part 2, and you can move updates over to it.
Worldwide events: in Timeline, GEO Story and Liveblog, an event about something global now shows the whole world instead of a pin in a random place.
Coming soon: scroll stories. You'll build them from sections like text, media, maps and a reveal, where images change as the reader scrolls. We're testing it now, and you'll see it marked "Coming soon" in your workspace.
Why it matters
Most of this update started with a newsroom showing us something they couldn't do yet: a callout where readers wanted to write instead of send a photo, a story that needed a line chart, a dataset too big for a chart, or an editor who wasn't sure a post had actually gone out.
So keep telling us. If something in Timepath gets in your way, let us know and we'll look at it.
These features are available now in the Timepath editor.
Curious how these new updates could improve your newsroom's workflow?
Book a short demo session with our team!
