As a few of you have noticed already, today we launched a new feature in beta: show news.
For a long time now we've had an articles section with first-hand writeups from our excellent staff writers. We're just a small team though so we're not able to cover all of the interesting developments going on in the TV world. While most of the news quickly finds its way to our editing system, it doesn't really stand out in there so it's easy for news get lost in the crowd of data. For example when it's announced that a new actor joins a show's main cast, we can immediately add a Cast entry to the show but our visitors wouldn't really notice unless you clicked through to the show's cast list and scrolled all the way to the bottom. Or, when it's announced that a show's current season will be the final one we don't currently have a way to report on that until the final episode aired.
So to help fans stay on top of the latest news, we're introducing (show) news. With show news we can link to existing news articles on an external site; providing just a title, summary snippet, and the target URL. Or, when the source of the news is not a website but f.e. a press release it's possible to skip the URL and instead provide the actual news text right here.
When news is posted, it's prominently displayed on the show's page for a couple of days. After that, it's only linked in the showpage's sidebar and the dedicated news subpage.
To prevent an overload of irrelevant news, only specific events are allowed, as listed in this policy: https://www.tvmaze.com/faq/37/news. That list is definitely not final, feel free to suggest other types of news that should be allowed.
Right now, only Writers and Head Contributors are able to create news, so we can slowly test the feature and work out the kinks. After that, the plan is to allow all Supporting Contributors and up to do so. To keep the quality high and prevent spam, we're not currently planning on opening this up to regular users.
If show news is a success, we plan to expand the feature to people, networks and web channels in the future. Also, we'd like to create an overview of recent news across all shows on the frontpage or elsewhere on the site that can be customized to your interests.
Any questions or feedback, be sure to let us know!
