The problem
Cosenza Live is an online daily paper for Cosenza and its province in Calabria. A small newsroom has to cover a large area. Every day it reads dozens of local sources, rewrites the stories that matter, and pushes them to Facebook and Instagram. Done by hand, that eats the whole day and leaves little time for real reporting.
What I built
An editorial hub inside the WordPress admin that takes a story from its source to social media in one flow.
- Source register: each source (website, online paper, podcast, social page, RSS feed) is a record with its feed, internal notes and the sections it covers. A two-step bulk import checks a list of URLs before adding them.
- News inbox: a scheduled job downloads new items from every active feed. An editor picks one and gets a draft article with the source name and original link already attached.
- AI drafting: a “Generate with AI” button in the editor and in the article list. Each journalist can save a personal writing style, which the AI uses. The editor can choose Anthropic Claude, OpenAI or Google Gemini, and spending is tracked per provider against a set budget.
- Source column: the article list shows at a glance whether a piece came from a source or is original reporting.
- Social calendar: a monthly calendar to schedule Facebook posts, Instagram posts and Instagram stories. A job checks every 5 minutes and publishes through the Meta Graph API.
- Homepage by area: an “In Evidenza” block with the 5 main sections, and a “Dal Territorio” block with a map of the province linking 7 towns to their latest news.
- Cron monitor: one page lists every scheduled job with a countdown, its recent runs and a “run now” button.
Built with
WordPress with the Fox theme and Elementor, custom PHP modules for the newsroom tools, my Redazione AI plugin, SportsPress Pro for football, Yoast SEO, Wordfence, W3 Total Cache, Complianz, Mailchimp for WordPress and WP Telegram.
Why it was done this way
Downloaded items are stored in their own database table, not as WordPress posts. Nothing reaches the public site until an editor chooses a story and turns it into a draft. The table was built for the steps a newsroom actually takes: review, approve, rewrite with AI, then publish.
