Welcome to OurNews

OurNews is a public storytelling platform. It gives schools a dedicated place to collect and share the stories of your school, with visibility controls that reduce the risks associated with communicating publicly on platforms like social media.

To see OurNews itself in action, visit ournews.school.

What we’re setting out to solve

• School newsletters that take many hours to gather content for, write, design, and send.
• School communications that are hard to read and inaccessible (like PDF newsletters).
• Giving schools a tangible way to respond to the changing regulatory, cultural and risk landscape around the sharing of sensitive staff and student information online, especially on social media.
• Giving schools a tool that better equips them to meet the changing ways that parents consume information and connect with their school community.

How it works

• Stories flow into the Hub via a unique email address or a link your school shares with contributors.
• The coordinator opens the hub, writes or edits the story, uploads media, and tags it.
• Every story carries a visibility setting: public and shareable by anyone, gated so photos and names are withheld until a reader hands over an email address, or link-only so the story only opens for someone who arrives through your school’s own link. None of these require a parent login.
• The layout and design of each story is automatically curated by the platform in adherence to a set of professionally designed, responsive templates.
• Once a story is ready, it may be published directly to the feed and curated into a collection, such as a newsletter.

What makes OurNews unique

Visibility controls

We designed visibility controls inspired by cybersecurity practices, such as reducing attack surface, to give schools a way to meaningfully reduce the risk of attack or abuse of sensitive information, without having to exclude important community connections from good-news stories (such as future prospective families and grandparents) due to the use of parent logins.

Storytelling culture

As our co-founder, Jacob Shultz from Bolsta Education, regularly speaks about: building a storytelling culture in a school community is an important component of creating belonging, connection and long-term stability. OurNews is built to be the hub of this culture, by centralising story capture, curation and development.

No integrations

We’re acutely aware of ‘platform-fatigue’ in schools. We want to do all we can to reduce the interdependence of platforms, instead seeing ourselves as ‘a layer on top’ of your core ICT infrastructure. So much so that we have a no-integration posture: OurNews should always be able to perform its core function extremely well without relying on integrations.

Becoming a founding school

What it is

In September–November 2026, we’re opening access to OurNews to a small group of founding schools in our Pilot Program.

Timeline

Price

AUD$1,500 / USD$1,050 / €900

Covers the pilot and your school’s first full year. After year one, the following two years will be at half price.

What we offer to founding schools

• A working product from day one.
• Your old newsletters uploaded as archives.

Three two-hour workshops with the other founding schools and industry experts:

• Reducing reliance on social media in your comms strategy and enrolment journey
• Keeping your school cyber-safe (with Trent Ray from the Cyber Safety Project)
• Creating a storytelling culture (with YELLOW CAR)

• Direct email support access to the OurNews team.
• Founding-member pricing.
• No lock-in.

What we ask from founding schools

• Use/trial OurNews across the length of the program (internal use recommended to begin with)
• Attend the three workshops
• Answer a few short questionnaires, and give a short testimonial at the end.

We’re not asking you to stop your current newsletter or social media, or to decide about switching systems during the pilot.

Our approach to Privacy, Safety & Security

OurNews’s core approach is to reduce attack surface area: what information is held or exposed in the first place, the quantity of sensitive information, how many people can see it, and how many systems it connects to.

Visibility controls

• Public. A normal article, readable and shareable by anyone.
• Gated. The story’s text is public, but photos and names are withheld until a reader confirms an email address with a one-time code. Every reveal is logged, and a faint corner stamp carrying the viewer’s own email sits on the photo, so sharing is traceable.
• Link-only. The story doesn’t appear on any public page and opens only for someone who arrives through your school’s own link. Photos and names still need the same email check.
• None of these require a parent login or account.

Reducing risk

OurNews aims to reduce your school’s public communications risk from high to low. We use several layers of friction to reduce the risk of both opportunistic misuse and automated, large-scale scraping:

• Visibility setting itself (Public / Gated / Link-only), using an email-plus-one-time-code mechanism.
• Server-side gating of sensitive information: withheld content is never sent to an anonymous request in the first place.
• Standing, possession-gated link for Link-only stories, rotated automatically on a schedule and by a coordinator at any time.
• Images are delivered via a URL that only delivers an image if the visibility setting allows.
• A visible corner stamp on revealed photos, carrying the viewer’s own identifier.
• Reveal-event logging.
• Right-click / save disabled at Gated and Link-only. Left on at Public, where sharing is the point.
• Bot and crawler protection.
• Malware scanning on every upload, protecting the platform itself from a malicious file. PDFs are never rendered by OurNews: they’re offered only as a download.
• Encryption, access control and infrastructure

Encryption and data residency

• Content is encrypted at rest and in transit.
• Data is held in the region you choose at signup: Australia, the EU, the UK, the US or Singapore.
• Access control on media. No photo has a raw, public storage link. Every image is served through OurNews’s own access-controlled route, which checks the story’s visibility setting on every request.
• The content-delivery cache respects visibility settings: only Public content is ever cached externally. Gated and Link-only content is served fresh on every request and never cached.

Internal and support access

• Our application never runs free-form queries against a school’s content; every read goes through a tenant-scoped access layer. When our team needs to investigate, they use defined, access-controlled tools rather than ad hoc queries against a school’s data.

Underlying infrastructure

• Supabase (database)
• AWS (media storage, email and malware scanning)
• Vercel (application hosting)
• Sentry (error monitoring)
• Cloudflare provides bot protection.

Security certifications

• OurNews is built to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), the Australian Privacy Principles and the GDPR.
• We have committed to beginning the Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) assessment during the Pilot Program, with the goal of holding it at public launch.
• We maintain a cross-framework control inventory mapped to the SOC 2 trust services criteria, ISO 27001 Annex A and the Essential Eight, and are working towards a SOC 2 Type I attestation, with controls designed to Type II operating expectations. A summary of the control inventory is available on request, per clause 8.2 of our data processing terms.
• We treat certification as an ongoing commitment, and expect to pursue further certification as OurNews grows.
• Our position, regardless of certification status, is to minimise what we hold: no student database, no parent database, no class lists. The personal information we do hold, published photos and stories, is the same kind of content your school already publishes on its own website, with greatly increased data security measures.

Data processing and handling

• We only store what your school publishes, and a small log of who revealed withheld content and when.
• We don’t hold parent logins, student ID numbers, enrolment records or biometrics.
• Your school stays the owner and controller of everything it publishes; OurNews acts as the processor. For the small reveal log, OurNews is the controller, and it’s minimised and time-bounded.
• A takedown removes an image from the live system immediately, because every image is filed against the story it belongs to and is easy to find.
• Every upload is scanned for malware before it becomes visible to anyone, and validated by its file content, not extension.
• PDFs are never rendered by OurNews. They’re offered to a reader only as a download, with their text pulled out server-side so the archive shelf stays searchable.
• Our data processing terms and the services we rely on are published on our trust centre.

Integrations

There are none.

Continuity

• You can export everything your school has published at any time, in an open format, without needing to ask us.
• If your school’s account ends, you have 30 days to pull a final export. After that, your content and staff accounts are deleted, and gone from backups 7 days later.
• If we were ever to decide not to continue OurNews, we’ve committed to telling schools in writing, keeping the service running through a wind-down period, and supporting every school to export its content.

Incident response

• If we become aware of a breach affecting your content, we’ll inform you within 72 hours, with what we know at the time, and keep you updated as we learn more.
• We’ll help your school meet its own obligations under your local regulation, such as Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
• We’ll tell you before making any public statement about a breach affecting your content, unless the law requires otherwise.

More questions