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How to use fancy WWRs

The standard WWR has six mandatory elements:

  • Headline
  • URL
  • Description
  • Source
  • Author
  • Link tags

The standard way these elements get displayed is:

Source / Author Headline (linking to URL) Description

But we have a few other options to vary these elements and how they get displayed.

Quote WWR​

These use two additional elements:

  • Quote to Highlight
  • Quote Attribution

You can find these near the bottom of the WWR popup. Tips:

  • The quote should not be put in quotation marks — the WordPress template will take care of that for you. So:

    • GOOD: To be or not to be — that is the question.
    • BAD: "To be or not to be — that is the question."

  • The attribution should start with the speaker's ID. This could be just a name ("Jeff Jarvis," "Edward R. Murrow," "George Clooney") or, more often, might also have some explanatory language up front ("Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara," "Sen. Cory Booker," "Guardian editor Katherine Viner"). If there's no need to explain the statement, it can end right there. Otherwise, add whatever context is needed for the reader to understand the quote and its relevance/meaning.

  • Both the quote and the attribution should end with a period (or other terminal punctuation). There's no hard limit on the length of a quote or attribution, but c'mon, be reasonable; quotes will typically be a single sentence.

  • The WWR popup will automatically copy whatever you put into Quote to Highlight into the Headline field and whatever you put into Quote Attribution into the Description field. Fill out the source, author, and tags as usual.

  • Note that, if you for some reason have to edit a Quote WWR later in WordPress, it's the Quote to Highlight and Quote Attribution fields that actually determine what shows up in the newsletter. The headline and description fields are just dummy copies of those fields. If for some reason you update one, you should update the other too.

Number WWR​

These use two additional elements:

  • Number to Highlight
  • Number Description

You can find these near the bottom of the WWR popup. Tips:

  • The number can be in any (reasonable) format: 147; 23,102; 72%; $3,443,000; $104 million; €4.7 billion; 33 1/3; 0.6; Twelve. Just make it a number. - Examples of Number Descriptions: "The number of tweets posted during..."; "How many shares of..."; "Estimated attendance at..."; "How many monthly unique visitors the..."; "The total annual subscription revenue of..."; etc. As with the Quote Attribution, this'll usually be one sentence, but a second short sentence is okay too if useful for explaining to readers.

  • Number Descriptions should end with a period or other terminal punctuation. (The Number to Highlight is just a number — no period.)

  • The WWR popup will automatically copy whatever you put into Number to Highlight into the Headline field and whatever you put into Number Description into the Description field. Fill out the source, author, and tags as usual.

  • Note that, if you for some reason have to edit a Quote WWR later in WordPress, it's the Quote to Highlight and Quote Attribution fields that actually determine what shows up in the newsletter. The headline and description fields are just dummy copies of those fields. If for some reason you update one, you should update the other too.

WWRs with images​

These use one additional element:

  • WWR Image

You can find it near the bottom of the WWR popup. It's a standard WordPress image module: Click "Choose Image" and either upload a new image or choose an existing one in the Media Library. Tips:

  • Images here face the same rights issues as images we use as featured art on a story. With rare exceptions, we shouldn't use a photo from a publisher, wire service, or photo syndicate; you can't just throw up any random Getty image.

  • Screenshots, charts, video stills, images from press releases, and other things we'd feel comfortable putting in the middle of a story are fine.

  • Unlike the images we run with stories — which are overwhelmingly horizontal — it's totally fine (even encouraged) to use a vertical/portrait image, since most people will be scrolling through this email on their phones.

Social screenshot WWRs​

This is the sort of WWR to use when you the thing you're linking to is a tweet, a Bluesky post, or a YouTube video and you want to include a screenshot of the post or video in the newsletter. Unlike the other types of special WWRs, this one doesn't require any action on your part.

Anytime you trigger the WWR popup (by clicking the bookmarklet) on a page from x.com, bsky.app, or youtube.com, the popup will detect that fact and include a box that says:

🚀 Social Media Post Detected!
{checkbox} Generate screenshot for email newsletter Uncheck if you only want to reference this post without embedding it.

There's no other action you need to take; edit and publish your WWR as usual. When you do, WordPress will automatically generate a screenshot of the tweet/skeet/video embed and then attach it to WWR so it can appear in the newsletter.

What if you don't want to have a screenshot attached to your WWR? Just follow the instructions and uncheck the checkbox to let WordPress know you don't want the embed. (You can also remove a WWR's social screenshot on the Edit WWR page in WordPress.)

Some tips:

  • There are a few specific circumstances where this function will fail silently — so always be sure to check the WWR before the email goes out to make sure all looks good. The cases I'm aware of:

    • On YouTube, some channels (typically those run by large media companies) limit the ability to embed their videos on other websites. If you try to WWR one of their videos, the screenshot it'll generate will be a black rectangle saying "Video unavailable / Watch on YouTube."

    • On Bluesky, users have the option to make their posts only visible to logged in users, which blocks websites from embedding their posts. If you try to WWR one of their posts, it'll seem to work, but there'll be no actual screenshot attached to the WWR. The same would be true for Twitter users with private accounts — even if you follow their account and thus can see the tweet, we can't generate a screenshot externally.

    • In both of these cases, just uncheck the checkbox — or delete the attached screenshot in WordPress after you save draft/publish.

  • Note that he popup is using the domain name to identify a social post. So all URLs on x.com, bsky.app, and youtube.com will trigger this "Social Media Post Detected!" message. In rare cases, that'll be a bad idea. Examples: You're WWRing someone's Bluesky profile page instead of a single post. Or a YouTube channel as opposed to a single YouTube video. Or Twitter's Community Notes help page rather than an individual tweet. In those rare circumstances, just uncheck the box.

  • If there's a good argument for adding additional platforms to these three (Twitter, Bluesky, YouTube), we can consider it. But for what it's worth, the Meta apps (Instagram, Threads, and Facebook) intentionally block the function this process depends on, so they're not candidates, and LinkedIn posts are typically too long to make for a good screenshot.

  • If you ever want to add a screenshot of a post on some other social platform, you can always take the screenshot manually and upload it as a WWR Image, just as you would any other screenshot/image. This is also true in those rare cases mentioned above (YouTube channels that block embeds, etc.)