Not everything worth sharing is news. A weekly devotional, philosophy essays, a project built over years: if it matters to its creator, there's a place for it here, and it lives right alongside the local journalism. A publication (you may also see "organization") is a shared identity with its own feed, its own masthead, and its own readers, whether that's a newspaper, a business, a nonprofit, a school, or two friends who write together.
Creating one
Publish as yourself or start a publication; if you're writing with anyone else, join forces, because a shared brand builds a readership faster than two separate names. From your publications in settings, create a new publication (the publications directory is where readers browse them). You become its owner, and from then on every create form lets you choose whether a piece publishes as you or as the publication. A free account includes one publication; Premium removes the limit. Nobody has to vouch for you first — creating a publication takes an account and nothing else. Publishing under it is the step that needs a vouch, so get vouched for whenever you're ready to put something out. Until then your publication is private: you can name it, give it a logo and write its pages, but it is not in the directory or in search, and its page opens only for you and your team. The moment you're vouched for, it opens on its own. Your publication's town shows beside its name wherever it is listed or credited, so two papers can share a name in different towns, but not in the same one.
Once you have claimed a handle, mylocalpress.com/@yourhandle opens your publication's
site: your masthead, your feed, and your pages in the menu. If you have connected your
own domain, the same link sends readers to your
domain instead. The link opens the site once you have published something; until then it
shows your profile card.
Every publication gets an RSS feed automatically, at
mylocalpress.com/@yourhandle/feed.xml, with an Atom version at /@yourhandle/feed.atom
(before you claim a handle, the same two feeds sit at /entity/{your publication id}/feed.xml and .atom). Each carries your 30 most recent stories with a link back to
each one; events, classifieds, and notices stay off it. Your pages advertise the feed, so
a news reader finds it on its own, and on your own domain the same paths work there.
The feed never carries a whole story. Each item is the headline, the byline, the date, a link, and a short summary: the one you wrote in the Summary field, or, if you left that empty, the first 300 characters of the story. A reader, a newsroom, or a crawler gets the same thing from the feed that your front page already shows, and reads the story on your page. The feed is always on and has no switch, because it exposes nothing the page does not, and publishing a feed does not give anyone the right to republish your work; a US appeals court has read it as permission to read in a feed reader and nothing more.
An existing paper, TV station, or radio station brings its masthead and keeps its name, with our platform underneath. The questions a move like that raises (migrating an archive, transitioning print subscribers, what the first months look like) are conversations, not settled features: talk to us.
Your team
From your publication's settings, invite people by email. Inviting someone means you vouch for them yourself, once someone has vouched for you: you state that you know the person and are responsible for what they publish under your publication. Accepting the invitation makes them a member; once they introduce themselves on the vouch form, you vouch for them from the invitation, with no founder queue. If nobody has vouched for you yet, their introduction goes to the founders like anyone else's, and they still join the moment they accept. They don't need a paid plan. Joining is free; what they publish under your publication draws on your plan's allowance, and what they publish under their own name stays their own account's business. One invitation can cover several publications you own. Removing someone ends their access to that publication and doesn't undo the vouch. Members can submit work for the publication's editors to review before it goes out.
Your pages
Every paper carries a few standing pages, and yours gets the same set, written by you from your publication's settings and rendered by us, on My Local Press and on your own domain if you have one: About (your history, your mission, the community you serve), Team (an optional introduction above everyone on your masthead, each person's photo and bio pulled from their own profile), Policies (corrections, ethics, ownership, complaints), Contact (tips, letters, phone, address), Advertise (who your readers are and what you offer, with the advertising request form linked at the bottom), Support (why reader support matters), and FAQ. Each page takes the same simple formatting stories do: bold, italics, and links.
Write only the ones you want. A page you leave blank doesn't exist, so readers never meet an empty shell, and a page you delete disappears the same way. Pages are written on the web; the apps show them to readers.
Your front page
How your publication looks to readers is one place on its settings page, the Your front page section. At the top sits a small version of your own page: your masthead, the weather line when it is on, and a story in the type you have chosen. Every control under it changes that miniature as you go, so you see what readers get before you save.
The weather shows tonight and tomorrow for your organization location, from the National Weather Service, plus any active weather alert, the way a paper's front page carries the weather for its own town rather than the reader's. It is on for a publication unless you switch it off, and off for a single-topic channel unless you switch it on. It needs an organization location, and it covers the United States.
Single-topic channel, on, turns your feed into a clean stream of your own stories: the community sections, the location and date line and the category tabs go away, and the weather goes with them unless you turn it back on.
Your typeface is the type your feed reads in. Seven looks: Classic, the standard My Local Press face, and six curated bundles — French Canon, the authentic 1690s colonial-press face; Garamond; Old Standard; Fraunces; Eczar; and Neon Wire, which is sharp and futuristic. Each one sets the masthead, the headlines, and the story text together, so the combination always looks deliberate. You can also set your masthead in ALL CAPS instead of as you typed it; that applies to the nameplate only and deliberately leaves your headlines alone. On the web you can go further and pick any family from Google Fonts for the masthead and headlines, the story text, or the bylines and labels, one part at a time.
Whatever you choose follows your feed onto the web and both apps, and readers see it when they're reading you. Your own personal feed has the same section on your profile page, without the single-topic switch, whether you run a publication or just write under your own name, and you don't need your own domain for any of it.
Custom type is part of Premium on the membership page. If a membership lapses, the look you already chose keeps rendering for your readers; what pauses is changing it.
Your own domain
A publication can live at its own address, and so can your personal feed. Connect a domain you own by adding a few records at your registrar (you keep your registrar, your email, and your DNS) and we serve your feed there under your name and your masthead. It's part of the Branded add-on on the membership page. This is your branded feed on our platform, not a custom website; hosting an entire existing site is a separate conversation. Once your domain is live we check it every week — your records, your certificates, your newsletter sending, and that the site and its audio still load — and if anything changes we email you the exact fix and show it on your publication's settings page.
Once your domain is live, readers stay on whichever address they're using. Anyone reading on your domain stays there, and your newsletter's links point to it. On My Local Press and in the apps, story cards and share links keep the mylocalpress.com address, because those links open the apps for readers who have them. Your domain shows as a link wherever we describe your publication: under its name on its page, and beside it on your personal profile, on the web and in the apps. From your domain, My Local Press at the foot of the menu and Part of the My Local Press Network at the bottom of every page lead back here, through a one-time welcome page that names your paper.
Readers who open the My Local Press app from your domain land on your feed, under your name and logo, and the app keeps opening there until they choose another feed. On Android that holds for a reader who installs the app from your domain too.
Your domain already tells search engines the whole story: every page carries your publication's name, logo, and structured publisher information, and your domain gets the search credit. Add your official Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube pages in your publication's settings and we include them too. Two things only you can do, because they prove you own the domain, each a single TXT record at your registrar: verify the domain in Google Search Console to watch your search traffic, submit the sitemap we already serve at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, and request indexing; and verify it in Meta Business Suite so your Facebook Page controls how links from your domain appear on Facebook and Instagram.
Print editions
If you print a paper, post the PDF of each issue and we build the archive readers come looking for, newest first. From your publications, open the publication and choose Back issues; each issue needs the date on its masthead and the PDF. A label like "Vol. 41, No. 12" and a front-page cover image are optional; PDFs up to 50 MB, PDFs only. The archive lives at its own address under your publication, called Back issues everywhere, and each issue opens as a PDF. If readers can grab a paper copy somewhere (the library, the diner, a rack outside the hardware store), list those spots and they appear as a list and a map below the archive, with directions. Posting happens on the web; the apps show the archive.
You can also turn a feed into a paper you print yourself. The print edition composes feed content into a printable newspaper, masthead and columns and all, for members. This feed composes from the feed you came from, My picks only from the stories you saved to your print tray, and From Across prints the archive of everything ever highlighted on From Across My Local Press, oldest first: the one long edition, it prints up to 32 pages where the others stop at 8, datelined with the span of dates the stories were highlighted. Paper sizes are Letter (8.5×11″) for home printers and three press sizes, 10.5×11″, 10.5×14″, and 10.5×16″, the PDF sizes community presses run on 24″, 30″, and 34″ paper; the Ink control switches between color and black and white. Print at 100% scale, never "fit to page." The press sizes come from The Trust Press, the nonprofit community press from the National Trust for Local News, and a press run is a relationship worked out with the press directly; the Resources page has the introduction. A press with different requirements? Tell us through the feedback form.
One story in several papers
If you own more than one publication, write a story once in the paper that's publishing
it, tick the other papers under "Also publish in", and publish. There is one story,
not four copies. Each paper shows it in its own feed under its own brand, and in any paper
other than the one that wrote it a small line under the headline says "Originally
published in
Selling ads
Most small papers sell advertising by phone, one conversation at a time. Your rate card here is a page a business can read, pick from, and pay on by themselves. From your publication's settings, choose Ad rates and add a placement: a name a business will recognize ("Front page banner"), a sentence on what the advertiser gets, the size (a full ad carries a picture, copy, and a link; a short ad is a line of text), who can see it (around your town, your state, the country, or everyone), and a price for each run length, counted in months. We show you the least you can charge for each spot, the platform's minimum for that size and reach; above it, the number is yours. A local placement is measured from where your paper is, so set the publication's location first.
Nothing is public until you turn on "Show these rates on my Advertise page"; until then businesses see the request form. When someone books, they pick a spot, write the ad, pay, and it goes live for the length they bought, rotating with the other ads there. You sell a run and an audience, never a guaranteed number of views. You keep 90% of what they pay, through the payout account you've already set up. Re-price whenever you like (anyone mid-booking pays the old price), untick a placement to stop offering it, and ads already paid for keep running. Setting rates happens on the web.
Donations for nonprofits
If your publication is run by a nonprofit, you can ask readers for a donation instead of support, and every donor gets an emailed receipt with your organization's legal name and EIN. The payment doesn't change, and neither does your share. You give us both when you create the organization as a nonprofit; if it already exists, open it in My Organizations, choose Edit, and fill them in under Donations. There is no switch to find — the two fields are what turns donations on, because a receipt cannot be written without them, and the wording on it is fixed for every organization. The button on your page then reads Donate to This Organization, and the receipt carries a number unique to your organization and counted from one each year, the date and amount, your legal name and EIN, the required sentence that no goods or services were provided, and a note that My Local Press processed the gift and kept its standard fee. Donors find their receipts under Payments in their own settings. A monthly donation gets a receipt each month. A receipt is never deleted: a refunded or disputed contribution is marked, not erased. We record what you tell us and don't verify tax-exempt status; the receipt says so and points the donor to their own tax advisor. Export a year's receipts as a CSV, one row per receipt with the status and any refund, from View and export your donation receipts; that's the file your bookkeeper or 990 preparer wants.
Where readers see your Support button
Once your publication can take support (payouts set up and a Premium membership), readers meet the same button in five places: under each of your stories, on your publication's page, in the Support local journalism section on a town's front page, in one line above the unsubscribe link of every newsletter you send, and at the end of the thank-you a supporter gets. The front-page section lists up to five publications located inside that town's area that have published there, newest publishing first, and a town with none shows no section. A nonprofit's button and newsletter line say Donate, and its donors get the receipt described above in place of the thank-you.
Your numbers
Your Numbers in Settings shows every publication you own, added up, with a row for each one; open a row for that publication alone, its best-read pieces, every piece it published, and its day-by-day activity. Only the owner sees them, because they include money. Views is how many times someone opened a piece, from anywhere. Seen in the feed is how many times a piece was on screen in someone's feed, which isn't the same as being read. Followers and paid subscribers are what you have now; new followers and new subscribers are what the window added. Support is your share, after fees. Three windows: Last 7 days, Last 30 days, and All time; views and feed impressions are counted day by day from when we started keeping them, and All time uses each story's lifetime counters. We don't track newsletter opens, because that means putting an invisible pixel in a reader's inbox, so that row says so rather than showing a zero. A reader who arrives on your own domain counts the same as one who arrives here: one count per piece.
Your newsletter goes straight to the readers who gave you their address, from your own domain with the Branded add-on, with monthly sending limits that cover normal use.