diff --git a/docs/news.rst b/docs/news.rst
index a6f1ff09d..25e251ed6 100644
--- a/docs/news.rst
+++ b/docs/news.rst
@@ -6,6 +6,19 @@ Release notes
 1.2.0 (YYYY-MM-DD)
 ------------------
 
+Requirements
+~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Scrapy's new requirements baseline is Debian 7 Jessie. It was previously
+Ubuntu 12.04 Precise.
+What this means in practice is that we run continuous integration tests
+with these (main) packages versions at a minimum:
+Twisted 14.0, pyOpenSSL 0.14, lxml 3.4.
+
+Scrapy may very well work with older versions of these packages
+(the code base still has switches for older Twisted versions for example)
+but it is not guaranteed (because it's not tested anymore).
+
 New Features
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~