Breaking news, send immediately
BREAKING: {{headline}}
Tap to read the live updates as they happen.
Use case
ReachBell for news publishers.
Breaking news in seconds, a daily digest your editor actually likes, and a traffic-recovery flow that doesn't need a CDP behind it.
The problem
The newsroom messaging tax.
A push tool that bills per send. An email tool that doesn't know the push tool exists. A homepage that's quietly losing returning visitors.
News is unforgiving about latency. A story that breaks at 11:42 needs to be on subscribers’ lock screens by 11:43, not 12:10 — because by 12:10 the same headline is on every competitor’s home page, every aggregator, and the algorithm-driven feeds of three large platforms. The push provider you picked when traffic was a tenth of what it is now becomes a bottleneck the day it matters most.
The second tax is editorial: most engagement tools treat the news desk like a marketing ops team. Compose, schedule, segment — every action requires a five-step UI dance. Newsroom CMSes don’t look like that. They look like a fast text input, a publish button, and a wire. The engagement layer needs to feel the same: ReachBell’s REST API lets your CMS publish straight to push and email in a single call, with section tags resolving the audience on our side.
The third is the slow attrition of casual readers. They opted in once, got a few irrelevant pushes, and stopped clicking. Without a re-engagement flow they show up in your monthly “unsubscribed” chart instead of your “saved” one. The win-back automation below is meant for exactly that segment — and it costs you nothing to run.
Templates
Notifications a newsroom actually sends.
Copy these into the composer. Replace the merge tags with your CMS fields and you're live.
Daily digest, 7 AM local time
Your morning briefing
Five stories shaping {{day_of_week}}. Read in 4 minutes.
Follow-up to a saved article
New on a story you're following
{{story_title}} just got an update — tap for the latest.
Local section subscriber
{{city}}: {{local_headline}}
A story we picked because you live nearby.
Re-engagement, 30 days inactive
We saved your spot
Three stories from this week you'd probably want to read. Welcome back.
Weekend newsletter
The week in {{section}}
Our editor's long-form picks for a slow Sunday morning.
Automation flows
The three flows every news site should run.
Built once in the visual flow builder, then triggered by your CMS for the rest of the year.
Breaking news fan-out
When the desk publishes a flagged article, push it to the audience within seconds — without spamming subscribers who don't care about that section.
- 01Trigger: CMS webhook fires with `priority: breaking` and the section tag.
- 02Match audience: subscribers who follow that section AND have not received a breaking push in the last 30 minutes.
- 03Send web push and mobile push in parallel — single send, two channels, one set of metrics.
- 04After 45 minutes, email the same story to subscribers who opted into the daily digest but skipped push.
- 05Stop the flow if the article unpublishes; correction notes go via a separate update template.
Daily digest delivery
Pick the top five stories of the morning and send a localized digest to every digest subscriber on time.
- 01Cron: 06:30 local time per timezone group.
- 02Fetch the editor-curated top stories list from your CMS (REST API, signed).
- 03Render the digest email template with {{stories}}, {{weather}}, and the masthead.
- 04Send to the `daily_digest_opt_in` segment, throttled to 200,000 messages per minute.
- 05Track opens, clicks, and the click-through rate per story slot — feed it back to the editor next morning.
Lapsed-reader traffic recovery
Pull subscribers who stopped clicking back to the site before they unsubscribe themselves.
- 01Segment: opted-in subscribers with zero clicks in the last 30 days.
- 02Send a "what you missed" email with three high-performing pieces from the last week.
- 03If the email is opened but no click, send a push the next day with a single curated story.
- 04If still nothing after 14 days, drop the subscriber to a weekly cadence and tag them `lapsed`.
- 05Surface a one-click preference centre everywhere — better to keep them as weekly than lose them entirely.
In the wild
Who's using it.
Dogfooded across our own portfolio before being put in front of customers.
The closest analogue to a newsroom inside our own stack is StumpScore, the cricket-scores property that sends push updates within seconds of a wicket or boundary. It runs the same shape of pipeline a news desk needs: an event hits a webhook, a segment resolves on the server, and a fan-out goes to a few hundred thousand devices before the next ball is bowled. If that loop can survive a T20 chase, it can survive an election-night live blog.
VedHoroscoperuns the daily-digest pattern — every reader gets a personalised morning message, timezone-aware, on a schedule that’s been up for months without missed deliveries. OmegleCo. uses the re-engagement flow to bring lapsed users back without resorting to weekly broadcasts. Same primitives, three completely different products.
FAQ
Questions, answered.
Everything teams usually ask before switching. Something missing? Email us — a human replies.
How fast can a breaking-news push actually land?
On healthy networks (FCM, APNs, VAPID over HTTP/2) sub-five-second latency is normal once the send is queued. ReachBell parallelises fan-out across worker shards so a 500k-subscriber push completes inside a couple of minutes, not an hour.
Can we segment by section, geography, or language?
Yes. Subscribers can carry any number of tags (`section:politics`, `lang:hi`, `city:mumbai`) and segments combine them with AND/OR. Saved segments are reusable across web push, mobile push, and email so the same audience reaches every channel.
What happens if the same story gets pushed twice by mistake?
Every send accepts an idempotency key — if your CMS retries the publish webhook, the second call is a no-op. Frequency caps per project also stop subscribers from receiving duplicate messages even when two flows fire on overlapping segments.
Can I run an editor-facing UI without giving the dashboard to the whole desk?
Yes. Viewer and editor roles let the news desk compose and queue without managing keys or billing, and every action is captured in a 90-day audit log so post-mortems on accidental sends are easy.
How do you handle GDPR consent for EU readers?
Subscribers consent at the prompt and can change their mind in the hosted preference centre. Consent events are recorded with timestamps and source, exportable to your DPO on request. Tokens never leave your project, so a future migration doesn't require re-collecting consent.