Reader Identity
Reader identity in NewsTeam is designed to be an organization-level concern rather than something each site or product solves in isolation.
In V1, that reader layer connects to identity and billing integrations. Identity integrations authenticate readers and issue access tokens for public products. Billing integrations expose products, subscriptions, and entitlement keys that can be mapped to content policies.
How It Works Today
Section titled “How It Works Today”The current reader flow is:
- A public product signs in a reader through an identity integration.
- NewsTeam issues an access token for authenticated V1 requests.
- Billing integrations return the products a reader can buy and the subscriptions they already have.
- Those subscriptions return entitlement keys.
- Organization content policies map entitlement keys to article access.
- Articles can carry a policy so the product and API layer can decide whether the full article should be available.
Why Organization-Level Matters
Section titled “Why Organization-Level Matters”Reader identity and entitlements should line up across the whole organization:
- Consistent access and entitlements across all sites and public products.
- A cleaner way to run multiple products without every team inventing its own access logic.
- A shared policy layer that lets commercial teams change products without rewriting article metadata.
- A clean bridge between external identity, external billing, and NewsTeam’s structured content model.
Typical Providers
Section titled “Typical Providers”This model is intended to work with the systems publishers already use. The current support package includes WorkOS for identity and Paystack or Polar for billing, and the same integration contracts can be implemented for other providers.
NewsTeam does not force you into a single reader or billing vendor. It gives those systems a structured place to connect to articles, sites, products, and policies.
Where This Is Going
Section titled “Where This Is Going”The longer-term direction is a richer NewsTeam-native reader layer with stronger first-party flows around profiles, subscriptions, saved preferences, and access state.
The important V1 foundation is already in place: readers authenticate through public products, billing integrations provide entitlement truth, and content policies connect those entitlements back to protected articles.