readMedia's Hometown Newsmaker delivers hometown news announcements to newspapers across the country. It does not deliver press releases to news publications outside of the US, but you can still create an online release for international students.

If you upload a spreadsheet with foreign postal codes into the Hometown Newsmaker, these entries will be highlighted in red on your spreadsheet, alerting you to an error. The Hometown Newsmaker will NOT distribute hometowners for entries with errors. If you need to send hometowners about students from foreign countries there are two steps you will want to take:

First, change all of your out-of-the-country postal codes to "00000". It's usually easier to make these changes before uploading your spreadsheet. A postal code of "00000" will create a web-only hometowner for this person. These students' hometowners will appear online and be included in your school's master feed, but their announcements will NOT be delivered to international news outlets.

Second, you'll need to insert personal email addresses into your spreadsheet and deliver your hometowner to them by email. To do this, simply add a column to your spreadsheet titled "email". Any email address in this column will have a copy of this hometowner sent to them. This allows you to CC international students (or their parents) a copy of their release and a link to their hometowner online.

Following these two steps lets you to deliver announcements about international students to non-media recipients. Here's a sample spreadsheet set up to email international students:



For more about the Email CC feature, visit Emailing Parents