Plenty of newsrooms using Ghost want their reporting picked up elsewhere, and then have no idea whether it was. A Republish button on your posts hands other outlets clean, ready-to-paste HTML — your byline, your credit line, your terms — and quietly tells you where it ran.
That is more or less the invitation, and the easier you make it to accept, the more often somebody does. So the button below is a real one, on an example post.
✓See which articles get picked up, and which sites are running them
✓The counting is a tiny pixel and script — it keeps working on sites that strip JavaScript
Example post
The county quietly stopped testing its water
By Dana Ruiz · 4 March 2026
For eleven months, nobody checked. The county's water utility let its testing contract lapse last April and never renewed it, according to procurement records released to the Ledger under a public records request.
The gap covers the whole of the period in which households on the east side began reporting discoloured water, and the four months of council meetings at which nobody from the utility was asked about it.
A spokesperson called the lapse “an administrative oversight” and said sampling resumed in March, three weeks after the Ledger's first enquiry.
Press it. That's the modal another outlet gets, and the copy buttons really copy — the guidelines and the credit line at the bottom would be the ones you wrote. The pulse is ours, to catch your eye on a long page; yours won't do that.
Your call, not ours
Two settings, and you're done.
Put the button where you want it.
Name an element on the page and say whether the button goes before it, after it, or inside at either end. Under the article body suits most themes; up beside the byline suits some. Label it whatever you like, too — Republish, Steal this story, Reprint permissions.
If the selector matches nothing, the button doesn't vanish — it parks itself in the bottom corner of the page so you can see it and fix the setting.
State your terms.
Set your own guidelines and credit line (appended to each copied article) in the Tools dashboard. Headings, bold, links, lists — whatever your republication policy actually says, including a link out to the full version of it.
What comes back
Who ran it, and how often.
Every republished copy carries the pixel and the script, both stamped with the article and your site. The Analytics tab groups what comes back by article, and then by the site that ran it — so “did anyone pick this up?” is answered with a list of names rather than a shrug.
Neither the pixel nor the script is 100% reliable — it depends on the republisher's CMS, the user's browser, server and browser settings, and possibly the phase of the moon. So we use two methods to reduce the chances that a republished article goes undetected.
The counts are loads, not people: nothing identifies a reader, and no visitor id ever leaves their browser. Pick a 7-, 30- or 90-day window, or export the lot as CSV.
Example republish analytics: pixel loads and JavaScript views, by article and by republishing site
Article / Republisher
Pixel loads
JS views
county-water-testing
4,182
3,844
themorningstar.example
2,986
2,986
valleyweekly.example
902
0
harborpost.example
0
640
(unknown)
294
218
school-board-recount
1,140
1,140
statewiredaily.example
1,140
1,140
Invented numbers, in the dashboard's own layout — and the two middle rows are the whole argument for using both methods. valleyweekly.example strips scripts, so the pixel is the only thing reporting them. The cut-and-paste that put the article on harborpost.example didn't keep the pixel — no problem, the script caught it. On either method alone, one of those two republishers would have gone unnoticed.
Why bother
A number you can put in a grant report.
"Our reporting ran in eleven other papers" opens doors — with funders, with boards, with the next round of members. It is also the one nobody can say honestly without having counted, which is why so many newsrooms end up guessing at it in the grant application.
Counting also tells you where to spend your effort. The story that got picked up everywhere and the one nobody touched are both worth knowing about.
Pricing
The Republish Tracker for Ghost is included with Core.
