How to set up breaking news notifications in Mediapoint

To make sure you never miss breaking news from PA, you can now get our latest news alerts direct to your email or as a pop-up browser notification, as soon as they are published.

Simply log in to PA Mediapoint and go to the “account settings” in the top right-hand corner.

Under the “breaking alerts” menu, you can choose to receive either emails, pop-up alerts or both for our news and/or sport alerts.

You will start receiving real-time breaking news and/or sport alerts immediately, and your preferences can be updated in the “breaking alerts” menu at any time.

Clicking on the link in the new alerts will also take you to our latest coverage of the breaking story on PA Mediapoint.

If you are on an Understand the News, Make the News or Shape the News package you can also toggle on the Spotlight briefings for Politics, Health and ESG to receive these briefings directly to your inbox.

What to do if your browser notifications are disabled

If the alerts won’t turn on, you may see an error message saying “Browser Notifications are disabled on this device”.

If so, to turn on browser notifications simply click the symbol in the Chrome address bar and switch the Notifications “on”.

If your screen says notifications are blocked when you click the symbol, as in the screenshot below, you can still turn them on by clicking “Site settings”:

Clicking Site settings opens a new tab which will enable you to scroll to Notifications and select “Allow” in the dropdown.

Once you’ve turned on Notifications, go back to Explore and reload the page to switch the alerts on for News or Sport.

You will know the alerts are set up and working when you receive a Welcome alert the first time you switch them on.

How to set up other email notifications

You can also set up and manage up to 20 different email notifications tailored to your needs. This is done using the “Your Notifications” option on the left-hand menu.

When adding a new notification:

• You can press enter/return after each word or phrase to enter your search terms, and you’ll see a preview of the results below.
             
• If you type multiple words and then press return this acts as a phrase. If you include a multi-word phrase, the results will only show e matches where stories include          all the words in this order.
             
• For example, a search for “Duke and Duchess of Cambridge” would only match to stories where “Duke”, “and”, “Duchess”, “of” and “Cambridge” appear next to each other and in the same order.
             
• If you are searching for multiple search terms, use the buttons below the search box to choose whether you want to search for ALL the terms in your search, or ANY of the search terms.
             
• Clicking the “Show Options” menu allows you to tailor your notification requirements, so you can include/exclude search terms, include/exclude topics and filter by territory
             
• There is also the option to have updates in real time or scheduled. Scheduled  notifications allow you to set up regular updates (hourly, daily or weekly) that include all the latest stories that match your criteria.
             
• Other options include receiving the story headline as the email subject line or setting a custom phrase.        
             
• You can also choose whether to receive relevant press releases, latest posts from PA Now or diary entries.

• To finish setting up the notification, click “Create Notification”. Your saved search      will then appear in “Manage Your Email Notifications” section.
             

• From here, you can edit or delete your searches at any time.

Ad Blockers disable notifications

Ad Blockers can prevent the Notifications page from loading properly. If this is the case, please disable your Ad Blocker for Explore – you can usually find your Ad Blocker in your Chrome Extensions.

Still having trouble?

Notifications can also be disabled by your Operating System. If this is the case, you will need to allow your machine to show you push notifications. Please speak to your technical team to ask them to enable this.

The notifications do work on mobile devices, but do not work on any browser on iPhones – Apple only allows apps to send push notifications, not websites such as Explore.

The notifications do not work in Internet Explorer.

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