Short News App and Digital ePaper Platform for Regional Publishers

Print readers and phone readers want different things

A regional newspaper has two audiences. Subscribers who grew up with the printed edition want the ePaper: the same pages, the same layout, on a screen, with a date archive. Younger readers want a feed they can swipe through between two tasks. Publishing a WordPress site with long articles serves neither well. A publisher-focused platform gives each audience its own surface from one newsroom.

The four surfaces InstNews ships

• **Swipe-up short news** — concise, mobile-friendly vertical news cards readers swipe through.
• **Digital ePaper** — upload, organise and publish digital editions of the physical newspaper with zoom and a date archive.
• **Editorial newsroom** — an admin workspace for creating, reviewing, scheduling and publishing full articles and short news.
• **Responsive reader portal** — a homepage with category sections, a breaking-news ticker, search, trending content and article pages, installable as a PWA on mobile and desktop from the browser.

The InstNews product page lists the interfaces: the reader web application, admin dashboard, staff portal, REST API and database.

Why a PWA instead of app-store apps

A progressive web app installs from the browser, updates when the site updates, and needs no store listing. For a district news portal that is the difference between launching this month and negotiating store reviews. Native Android and iOS apps remain possible as scoped work; the sister product Dino News includes an Android app in its scope, and the Dino News versus InstNews comparison sets the two side by side.

Multi-language and multi-district from one newsroom

Regional publishers cover states, districts and cities, often in more than one language. InstNews's category and section structure lets one newsroom publish district-level sections while the reader portal groups them; the branding, category navigation, fonts and social sharing cards are all white-label configuration.

The commercial difference for a publisher

News-platform subscriptions charge monthly and keep the reader data on the vendor's servers. InstNews is bought once for the agreed scope and deployed on hosting the publisher controls, which keeps the subscriber list, the archive and the ad placements under the publisher's own domain. The self-hosted software guide covers what that means operationally.

What is included

Every purchase includes complete source code for the agreed scope, deployment on hosting the buyer controls, basic migration assistance and three months of technical support. Hosting, domain and third-party service fees are billed by those providers. Pricing is quoted on scope rather than published; send the requirement through the contact page and TechDino returns a written quotation after a walkthrough.