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Crowdsourcing Breaking News from Social Media

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Crowdsourcing breaking news from social media
BY CORY BERGMAN

Today Mashable published a story on an ambitious social media project we’ve been working on at msnbc.com — @breakingnews and now BreakingNews.com and our mobile apps — so I thought I’d take the opportunity to offer some inside perspective. A year ago, we took the reins of @breakingnews from Michael van Poppel of BNO News, who in many ways invented real-time breaking news aggregation. Since then, we’ve been curating breaking news alerts and links around the clock — even from “competitors” — publishing not only to Twitter but also to BreakingNews.com, Facebook and mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Windows 7 devices.

Now we’re trying something new. Our team is not just looking at traditional news sources, but updates from observers at the scene who are snapping photos with their phones and sending them out on Twitter. For example, here are a few photos from the London protests today. And we’re not only curating them ourselves, but encouraging our users on BreakingNews.com to help us “spot” them. (Click “spot” and you can send us links to tweets, Twitpic/yFrog/Plixi photos and YouTube clips). Of course, this only works on highlyvisible stories (like weather and protests), but as more people use smart phones wired into social media, the volume will only increase.

Notice we’re not asking users to send us photos/video, but send us links to photos/video. So if someone you’re following on Twitter stumbled across a story, you could send us a link to her tweet. That’s a big philosophical shift for news organizations that

historically want people who shot a photo to send it directly to them. But social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have become the standard ways that people share breaking news, and you can “spot” news without witnessing it yourself. As we’re learning, discovering breaking news in the social media vortex isn’t easy. Especially discovering it quickly. But by combining around-the-clock editors with technology and the crowd, we think we can get there. Please let me know in comments what you think about how we’re doing so far.

Summary Details how BreakingNews.com and social media users can become news sources

Description Our team is not just looking at traditional news sources, but updates from observers at the scene who are snapping photos with their phones and sending them out on Twitter. And we’re not only curating them ourselves, but encouraging our users on BreakingNews.com to help us “spot” them. Of course, this only works on highly visible stories (like weather and protests), but as more people use smart phones wired into social media, the volume will only increase.

Tags: android, BreakingNews.com, Facebook, Michael van Poppel, mobile apps for iPhone, Social Media, twitter, Windows 7, YouTube

Posted by Benjamin Fossel

Dec 02, 2010 10:53 am GMT Viewed 2400 times

Author: CORY BERGMAN Source

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