- 05/05/2022
Snopes publishes wire content from the Associated Press. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to find articles since we don't have licenses for all articles, and from their website, it isn't clear which articles we have access to.
There was a discussion about programmatically pushing all available articles to WordPress and letting them select which ones to publish. In a database that is already very large, this creates a lot of unused articles. So we decided to create a Slack application to push all available articles to a handful of Slack channels where writers can selectively push stories to WordPress as drafts.
We created a Slack channel for each feed type we want to monitor, and I created a Slack application to poll the feeds and update each channel when there is an update. An article entry in Slack displays a title, summary, thumbnail, AP link, keywords, and a button to create a draft in our CMS. A writer can review the available articles at a glance, read the AP article itself, and search for articles using Slack.
Writers can search AP or view feeds directly in a Slack modal with paginated results using a handful of slash commands. Additionally, I'm exposing the source data to writers via a slash command to inform them of raw data from AP, which has helped us polish the article view in Slack.