What Distributors Should Be Configured?

This document is an exercise to help you identify which distributors need to be configured for your organization. After this you should be ready to configure distributors in Global Settings. If you aren’t very familiar with distributors or the terminology in this document, see Managing distributors.

When creating distributors, it is helpful to think of yourself filling out a table such as this one. When completing this exercise, we recommend you create a spreadsheet with the following columns and fill it in as you work through these steps.

Step 1

Pick a content type (articles, videos, or images) to start to write distributors for. (Configuring galleries in global settings is not available yet.)

Step 2: Distributor Name

Pick one of the following distributor categories: staff, freelance, wires, handout, stock and other. For that category, what are the names of the different providers? Enter a name that will be familiar to content producers since this is what they’ll see in Arc apps such as Composer. For example, the name will be used when selecting a distributor for a story.

Step 3: Distributor Subcategory

Do any of the providers have additional metadata—not already covered by distributor category and name—that is important for distinguishing one distributor from another? That information belongs in the distributor subcategory field.

For example, the first table in this documentation contains two distributors that both signify freelance content. However one represents unsigned freelance content and the other signed freelance content. It is important to distinguish these separately because these need to be handled differently in syndication and on distributed platforms. Thus we have two distributors that have the same distributor name and category (“Special to The Washington Post” and “wires” respectively) but different subcategories (“Freelance Signed” and “Freelance Unsigned”).

Step 4: Content restrictions

If you’re a multi-site organization, are there any providers whose content is restricted from appearing on all websites? If so, in order to add that restriction, you must specify which distributor to assign that content restriction to. For information on configuring restrictions, see Managing website restrictions.

Step 5: Covering each distributor category

Repeat steps 2–4 for each distributor category that you want to create distributors for in Global Settings. It is not required to make distributors for each category, particularly the “Other” category.

Step 6: Covering each content type

Repeat steps 2-5 for each content type to make sure distributors are created for stories, images, and videos.

Step 7: Consolidating distributors

Do any content types share the same distributor category, name, subcategory, and restrictions? If so, those should be merged into the same distributor. Distributors can be for stories, videos, and/or images.

Through this exercise, you should have written out all possible unique combinations of distributor category, name, subcategory, and restrictions that you want users to select from. Here are some other tips on configuring distributors:

You can also use the following examples of distributor configurations as a baseline to get started with your distributors.

The first is an example of a single-site organization.

The second example is of a multi-site organization.