Notifications & alerts
Alerts tell you when a body you follow publishes something new — an agenda, minutes, voting record, or press release. You control the channel (email, Slack, or both) and how often messages arrive.
Channels: email and Slack
Email alerts go to the address on your JournoHelper account. Slack alerts post to a channel you choose after connecting your workspace.
Email and Slack are controlled independently. Turning off email for an organization does not silence Slack for that same body, and vice versa. That lets you keep a quiet inbox while your newsroom channel stays active.
Where: In the app: Settings → Alert Subscriptions (cadence); Settings → Integrations (Slack).
Cadence options
Instant — each new document triggers a notification as soon as it is ingested (busy meeting days may be batched into one summary).
Daily digest — one email per day summarizing everything new since the last digest.
Weekly digest — one roundup per week.
Off — you still follow the body and see documents in the app, but no notifications fire.
Set cadence at the jurisdiction level to apply a default to all organizations underneath, or override individual organizations for custom schedules.
Connecting Slack
From Settings → Integrations, click Connect Slack and authorize JournoHelper in your workspace. Pick a public channel from the list, or invite the bot to a private channel and select it.
Alerts include the document type, organization name, meeting date when available, and a link back to JournoHelper. See journo.help/slack for an overview aimed at newsroom admins.
Where: In the app: Settings → Integrations. Overview: /slack.
What triggers an alert
Alerts fire for new meeting documents and press releases from organizations you follow, subject to your cadence and channel settings. You only receive alerts for items dated on or after the day you started following that organization — older archive backfill does not spam your inbox.
Meeting notices, agendas, packets, minutes, voting records, and press releases each count as alertable document types when newly ingested.
Troubleshooting missed alerts
Check Settings → Alert Subscriptions — cadence may be Off or set to digest while you expected instant delivery.
Confirm you follow the organization under Sources, not just a parent jurisdiction with alerts disabled.
For Slack: verify the bot is still in the channel (re-invite after channel renames), and check that Slack is toggled on for that jurisdiction or organization.
Look in Documents — if the item is there but you got no alert, the document date may predate your subscription start, or the item arrived during a digest window.
Where: Still stuck? /support or /contact.
Burst batching
When a single body publishes many files at once — a full agenda packet with dozens of attachments — JournoHelper batches them into one notification instead of dozens of separate messages. The summary links to the Documents page where you can review each file.