Start from the direction of the flow
Ask one question first: does the platform send your content out, or bring material in? Lead-generation syndication networks do the former. A publisher looking for coverage needs the latter, and the two are rarely offered by the same company.
Seven things to compare
- Who controls the brief. Can your newsroom set the topics, region, language, length and daily pace, and change them without a sales call?
- What arrives with the text. A block of prose alone is not enough. Look for sources & checks attached to each item so an editor can verify before publishing.
- Image handling. Images should come with source and licence information. A picture without rights information is a liability, not an asset.
- Delivery. Manual archive for small teams, a private RSS feed for CMS importers, an API for deeper integration. Fewer channels that actually work beat a long list of integrations.
- Corrections. How are updates and withdrawals communicated after delivery? If the answer is "they are not", keep looking.
- Licence. Non-exclusive or exclusive, which domains, attribution rules, what happens to already published material when you cancel.
- Cost per article. Convert every plan into a price per delivered draft. Monthly fees hide very different unit costs.
What a good first month looks like
One publication, one country, one language and the two or three topics where routine production takes the most time. Run it for a few weeks, measure how many delivered drafts reached publication and how much editing each one needed. Then widen the brief or add a second one.
How this works in Doxx
Doxx is built for the second direction only: newsrooms receive material, they do not distribute it. The brief is a Stream you edit yourself. Each draft arrives with sources & checks and image suggestions with rights information. Delivery is the archive, a private RSS feed or the API. Pricing is per plan with a fixed number of credits, so the price per article is visible before you start.
Run the checklist against a real brief instead of a demo.