Twitter is starting a news revolution. Now that it has NBC's Vivian Schiller onboard, Twitter has formed a partnership with CNN and Dataminr to highlight breaking news in users' tweet decks.
Dataminr, a social analytics company, will soon release a new tool called Dataminr for News. This new tool considers 25 different criteria to determine what news is breaking and whether it is a hoax. It then sends a message in real time to journalists via Twitter, informing them that news is breaking.
CNN started using Dataminr's news tool to discover breaking news faster than any other leading network. The recent mall shooting in Maryland was just one of the stories Dataminr helped CNN break. Dataminr also alerted Twitter users to eye-witness accounts, videos and images of the event.
"It is very quickly becoming an essential tool," said CNN Digital Managing Editor Meredith Artley.
Twitter certainly thinks so. In recent years, Twitter has become the go-to platform for journalists seeking to break news, but every journalist's Tweet Deck is typically overloaded with so many tweets that it can be hard to distinguish between breaking news and old news. Often, by the time a topic is trending on Twitter, its novelty has already worn off.
Dataminr's CEO Ted Bailey stated that the goal of Dataminr for News is to "alert journalists to information that's emerging on Twitter in real time." The software searches tweets for eye-witness accounts, stories that can be corroborated and other signs that the news is in its "infancy." Although Dataminr can't guarantee that the stories it labels as breaking are factually correct, it does promise a certain level of security to journalists. The more tweets Dataminr finds to verify the story, the more the news item will "move up that confidence curve."
News organizations should of course make calls and send reporters to the scene of the report, but Dataminr's alerts will play a vital role in the news-gathering process. After all, the first step of breaking a story is finding out about it. CNN likened Dataminr for News to a police scanner because it gives journalists the tip of the iceberg--not the whole story.
Although Dataminr did not stated how much its new service would cost journalists, the company made it very clear that it will be a paid service. Bailey said that its service isn't a "one-size-fits-all product," adding that "every newsroom worker gets different types of alerts based on their role." Bailey did say that there will an enterprise price for large news organizations like CNN and another price for individuals.
