A rare bit of good news for journalists, an ambitious news publishing system from the LettsGroup stable went live today. It's called LettsNews and it describes itself as "'Newsroom tech for everyone". The British startup wants to reduce the cost and time taken to gather, publish and deliver news in the increasingly fragmented and real-time news industry. It could be a boon for overly stretched, under-staffed news rooms, and the growing number of freelance and self-employed journalists, writers and PR's.
Today LettsNews launched its cloud software platform for ever increasing news gatherers, commentators, freelancers and PR's that are looking for a better and more efficient way to gather, build and distribute the news. Their web app can be accessed from a laptop, PC or Mac and the all-in-one system can give any writer or PR a fully fledged newsroom in the Cloud. Mobile apps will also be available soon for work in the field.
More than ever, newswriters are freelancers, independents and even citizens, but their tools for news gathering are rudimentary or wildly expensive. They write in MS Word or Google Docs, they use their phones for photos and videos. They publish their news into proprietary systems like WordPress or WiX, Substack or Medium, X or Bluesky, one at a time - cutting and pasting, at best, each time.
From the family that invented the diary, LettsNews is a slick, cost effective, all-in-one news gathering, publishing and distribution system designed to streamline this fragmented industry and the digital age. When you write in LettsNews, it automatically makes HTML news pages ready for global distribution. Images, video and audio can be cropped and basic-edited in the app, in the field. And its entire approach is quite revolutionary - adding individual Content Items (text, image, video, audio) - one at a time.
It's object-oriented programming but for content! Each Content Item you load gets tagged, sorted and organised ready for you to drag and drop into news stories. As your library of Content Items grows, your ability to instantly create news stories multiplies.
While LettsNews users focus on adding new Content Items, the software can take care of the rest - from story building, to team collaboration, editing, auto-distribution and even auto-promotion of the distributed stories. With LettsNews each News Item component gets dragged and dropped into a News Story and can be shared with collaborators in virtual teams, supported by version tracking and sign off. Teams can be added for each publication, project or work stream, whether it's a company blog, journalist's Medium page, a small publication's site, investor comms or more.
When a news Story is completed it gets filed by the LettsNews system and published ready for auto, one-click distribution to a number of leading news sites, publishers and social media platforms - with more to come. LettsNews users can write once and distribute to multiple different places, including their blog, at the push of a button, doing what used to take many hours in just a few minutes. And Content Items (notes, images, video, or audio) can be re-used any number of times, dragged and dropped into numerous versions of the same story or new stories, leaving more time in the field or office to research, write and work on new stories.
LettsNews plans to add to its V1 offering launched today, introducing advanced AI to speed its system and the process even more, followed by a Content Item marketplace to help creators monetise news items better than before. Their writers and publishers will be able to buy 3rd party news items or clips (text, photo. video, audio) safely, securely and cost effectively - instantly dropping them into their own news stories - while providing a vital new income stream for news creators.
Add this all up and, in a couple of years, LettsNews could become a next generation, crowdsourced and machine-driven news agency for the masses. One fit for this new, fragmented, digital age. Step aside Reuters and Associated Press? We'll keep you posted.
This article first appeared at The Letts Journal.
