This is one of those blog posts where I write about my own role at BreakingNews, so full disclosure up front. But since BreakingNews is now one of the largest (if not the largest) social teams in journalism, I hope you’ll find the occasional post about our exploits interesting: in this case, our first international expansion.
Today, BreakingNews launched in the UK with a big-time partnership with MSN UK, an expanded London editorial team and the new Twitter account, @breakingnewsUK. In addition to our global coverage, we’re curating a deeper, UK-focused feed.
We’ve contemplated expanding internationally over the last several months. In fact, we spent a fair amount of time pondering our (beta) Twitter analytics, which revealed around 350,000 of our @breakingnews followers live in the UK — the most in any country after the US. It was a natural expansion, especially when you consider the phenomenal news year in the UK.
With the addition of two social news editors in the UK (@journodave and @TomMcArthur) to our teams in Seattle and NYC, we’ve grown substantially in the last few months. It’s amazing to remember that Michael van Poppel (@mpoppel) founded @breakingnews in 2007, curating breaking stories on Twitter late into the night from the Netherlands. Over the last year and half, we’ve expanded to BreakingNews.com, three mobile apps, Facebook, Tumblr and Google Plus.
By the way, architecting all this behind the scenes isn’t a cake walk. We’ve built a real-time social publishing system that allows us to quickly publish short-form breaking stories, routing them to the appropriate places while customizing the content for different platforms — and now, a different country. Turns out, UK news consumers aren’t very interested in regional breaking stories in the US. Go figure!
On Twitter, we decided that @breakingnewsUK will complement @breakingnews instead of duplicate it. So for example, a breaking Syria story will appear on @breakingnews but not @breakingnewsUK. A story in the UK that has global interest will be tweeted from @breakingnewsUK and then retweeted on @breakingnews. When big news breaks outside the UK, @breakingnewsUK will retweet @breakingnews. Got that? This is all automated through our editorial tool, and it still gives me a headache. A special thanks to @mintchaos and @magnetbox for figuring it all out.
Just like we do on BreakingNews.com, the updates on MSN UK retain direct links to original stories and eyewitness reports, preserving attribution. In a way, we’re a real-time social media wire that helps avoid “filter failure” and gives credit where credit is due. In fact, news organizations whose breaking stories appear in the BreakingNews’ widget on MSN UK should see a larger burst of traffic than they’ve customarily seen from us.
To date, about 160 news organizations are helping us find breaking stories by adding #breaking or #breakingnews to their tweets. Since we’re focused on finding the first instance of a breaking story — but we’re occasionally buried under an avalanche of tweets and other alerts — we’ve found this is a great way for news organizations to jump above the fray. We’ll be whitelisting UK news organizations in the days to come.
(Full disclosure: I work for BreakingNews, which is part of the msnbc digital network. Have feedback? Feel free to comment or drop me a tweet…)