Livingdocs Release July 2025: Rubrics, Deletion Routines and News Agencies

Page Management: Rubrics

As we have observed, many newsrooms are structuring their pages according to departments or a similar categorisation scheme. Whether you're setting up a department page or adding a new section to the home page, controlling the content for your teaser slots is now even more efficient and powerful thanks to the enhancements in the July Release.

The new Rubrics filter for algorithmic teasers allows you to select a topic (aka rubric) from a tree of topics allowing you to choose the one best fitting the specific section of your page.

When you assign the rubric (or sub-rubric) to an article, the article will appear in the corresponding category's spot automatically. For example, your latest publications on European politics will show up on the EU page, as well as on the main politics page. 

As with all algorithmic teasers, deduplication is automatically handled. When combined with Exposure Boosting, you can focus on manual curation where it truly makes a difference, with these automated processes relieving you from certain tedious tasks on pages or page sections.

Media Center: Deletion Routines

Image agencies produce a constant daily stream of images that require management. To ensure your image stock can stay streamlined and organised, we've introduced Deletion Routines with the July Release.

These routines operate based on deletion criteria that you define and control. You can decide whether all unused images should be removed after a certain period of time; alternatively, you can exclude specific categories from removal, like images from certain photographers or images that are manually uploaded.

Deletion Routines work automatically in the background on a regular schedule, without disturbing any other workflows. By retaining only valuable and actively used images, your image research will become more effective. This approach also helps meet contractual obligations that prohibit you from keeping unused agency images for longer than 30 days, for example.

To learn how to set up these routines, please consult our documentation or contact your account manager for support and guidance.

News Agencies (in development) 

We have heard your needs when it comes to news agency workflow support, and we are building a solution accordingly. This release is laying the initial groundwork for a dedicated solution that integrates news agencies and the corresponding workflows into Livingdocs, which will allow you to work with them seamlessly while within Livingdocs. 

More specifically, Livingdocs will accommodate both automatic and manual news agency workflows. In order to manually manage and curate a selection of news agency reports, we will provide tailored agency screens. Reports from designated agencies will appear in real time as they come in. You will be able to view and filter this list according to essential information like title, category and priority, allowing you to navigate through the list more effortlessly in order to access the details of each report and easily create articles based on these reports. 

When it comes to news agency reports managed by automatic workflows, Livingdocs will handle everything for you. These reports will be imported, transformed into articles and published automatically. Even updates to the news agency reports will be processed without requiring your manual intervention. Of course, if you decide to intervene manually and work on a story based on an automatically-executed news agency report, you will be able to do so at any point and stop the automated process.

The progression of news agency workflow integration within Livingdocs is ongoing. Keep your eyes out for updates when this workflow support will be fully available for use in your newsrooms.

Further improvements in the July 2025 Release include:

1. Improved Image Search UI and navigation

   Choosing a powerful image for your article is a key factor in determining the success of your story. As such, image selection should be as easy and straightforward as possible. This is why the Media Center now lets you flick through images with the keyboard arrows, even when expanded in the lightbox.

2. Target Length Metadata Plugin Extensions

   Setting a target length for a story helps in planning and setting the right expectations so you are able to focus and refine your text during the writing process. While specifying the target length in size ranges can be useful for this purpose, there are cases requiring more precision where an exact number of characters is necessary. The Target Length Metadata Plugin now offers both possibilities simultaneously, so you can switch to whatever method best fits your needs. Additionally, the target length can be defined not only according to characters but also to lines.

3. Team Member Tooltip

   Collaborating with your team in real time is a core capability available within Livingdocs. Team member avatars are labeled by their initials in collaboration tools. However, while some may recognise which initials correspond to certain colleagues, some may not be able to. Therefore, we made sure that you can now hover over an avatar and see the corresponding full name appear in case of uncertain identity. 

4. Base Filter for hasEmbargo

   To be best prepared to report on events like the death of a public figure or on content associated with an NDA, editors can write an article upfront with an embargo in place, so it cannot be published accidentally before the agreed upon publishing date. We have extended our filter capabilities so it is now possible to define dashboards showing only articles with an embargo in place so you can locate them without delay. 

5. Command API and Import API: Additional publish control features

   For some kind of content, the only way you can stand out against your competitors is with speed of delivery. Livingdocs has now levelled up its automation capabilities by equipping the Command API with a set of new operations to manage publish control matters like scheduled publications or embargoes. The Import API has been improved to set an embargo, if needed, when creating an article.

Breaking Changes & Upcoming Deprecations

In order to keep Livingdocs as streamlined and user friendly as possible, we periodically remove features when we have found better solutions to the problems they solve. We will always give you ample notice so that you have plenty of time to make adaptations to your setup. 

In the July Release, there are some technical breaking changes you need to be aware of as a technician working with Livingdocs. No user-facing features are affected. Please read the Technical Release Notes for a comprehensive list of changes that may affect your newsroom.

To get more in-depth, technical information about this release, please refer to our documentation site. There, you can also stream the recordings and peruse the slide presentations of our Feature Webinar and Developer Webinar.

We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!