HastingsNow | Your Local Guide to News, Events & Businesses in Hastings, MN

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Behind the Scenes: The Daily Grind of HastingsNow.com's QuickMinute Blog Posts (Spoiler Alert: It's Not for the Faint of Heart!)

Hey y'all, great news! HastingsNow.com is putting in some serious work to bring you the freshest local news every day with the help of LocalPigeon.

Let me break it down for you. Each morning, the team combs through five or more curated local content feeds on social media to find the juiciest stories for the day. They use some fancy tool called Walls.io to help 'em out.

Once they've got a story, they rewrite it into a killer blog post for HastingsNow.com, and make sure it's got some bangin' original images to go with it. They use this AI image generator thing called Midjourney to create three eye-catching visuals that really capture the essence of the story.

But wait, there's more! While those images are being made, the team also starts working on a video version of the story. They use an AI video-maker called Descript, and they've got access to a massive pool of stock media to help bring the story to life.

And that's not even everything. They also use Squarespace to organize all the elements into a blog post that's easy to read and share. They even make sure to give credit to the original source of the story, and link to their social media page.

But it doesn't stop there. HastingsNow.com also puts together a daily Top 10 list of other local stories from the past 24 hours, complete with video clips for Instagram Stories. And to make sure you never miss a beat, they include links to each brand's social media page so you can follow 'em for more.

So basically, every day the team is working their butts off to produce an original blog post, do some research to give the story more context, create three dope images, and make a video version of the story. They even optimize the post for social sharing and search engine visibility.

It's a lot of work, but it's worth it to make sure you're getting the best local news around. And of course, they give a shoutout to Midjourney, ChatGPT, and LocalPigeon for helping 'em out.