Keep track of any resources you use over the lifecycle of your stories, and easily share links to those resources with your story collaborators.
Over the course of planning, drafting, writing, styling, promoting, and monitoring a story, you'll likely use some online resources. These may be documents that contain your story outline or draft, planning tools, other stories used for inspiration, image lightboxes, communication channels, social media tracking etc.
The resource links feature keeps a list of those links easily accessible — from the story cards on your dashboard, and from within the Shorthand Editor. You can create and edit an individual list for any story.
To create a list of links for a story, click on a story card on the dashboard and choose Resources from the pop-up menu. Then just type or paste in a link to any online document or service and give your link a descriptive name. An icon will be automatically applied.
Adding links from the dashboard
You can also create and manage a list from within the story editor by clicking on the word RESOURCES at the top of the screen.
The list is the same whether created or accessed from the dashboard or the story editor.
Any collaborator on the story can see and edit the list. In this way, even collaborators who aren't editing the story in Shorthand can still access and add links to the list. If you collaborate with a large team, then resource links can be used to ensure that everyone has a single view of important links for the story.
For example, if you are responsible for creating a story in Shorthand, you may wish to add links to story drafts and your research notes, while a designer on the team could add links to online folders of prepared images for the story. That way, when you are in the story editor, you can easily find the content you need while creating. On the dashboard, your marketing department could add links to the tools they use to promote the story or monitor it on social channels. If your team uses online communication tools to discuss and plan stories, they could even link to channels in those tools.
The links aren't published with your story, so your readers won't see them — they're for you and your collaborators only. Be aware, though, that anyone who can see the story on their dashboard can also see, edit, and delete its links.
To manage your links, open the Resources panel. Hover over a link to visit it (opens in a new tab), edit its name or address, or delete it.
Managing story resources
If you make a copy of a story that has resource links, the links are also copied to the new story and will then act as an independent list.