Where I work at BreakingNews.com and @breakingnews, our 24/7 team of editors scours the web for the first instance of a breaking story and eyewitness accounts at the scene. We then publish a link, with credit, back to the source. As you might imagine, it’s not always easy, especially when we’re following hundreds of news organizations around the world and our @breakingnews Twitter account (with 2.8 million followers) is swamped with replies and mentions.
So today, we’re launching a new feature that allows local news organizations to fast-track tips to our editors natively on Twitter. The idea began when we published a breaking news alert linking an Associated Press story instead of the original source: the Denver Post. The Post kindly reached out, and we realized we needed a better way to quickly surface original local stories and give credit where credit is due.
Here’s how it works. Once we’ve whitelisted a news organization’s Twitter account, appending @breakingnews or #breakingnews anywhere in a tweet will pop it in front of our editors on this page. If it’s a breaking story with national or regional interest — and it’s the first we’ve seen of it — we’ll publish it on the BreakingNews.com home page, our three mobile apps and potentially on Twitter and Facebook, too. The bigger the story, the more places it goes.
When I worked in local news, I remember the frustration of breaking a big story only to have national sites publish their own versions of it — usually a wire story — without a link. Search engines rank the national versions over the local originators. And the national sites’ social presence overshadows the local news organization. We like to think BreakingNews can help fill part of this national distribution gap, especially on the social front.
So far, we have nearly 40 60 local news organizations that have asked to be whitelisted into the tipping program. Participating TV stations span every affiliation and several ownership groups (we’re entirely agnostic on who we link). What’s great about @breakingnews or #breakingnews is it’s a natural way to tag a breaking news tweet — many users already use them.
Like Andy Carvin is thinking at NPR, there are interesting applications beyond local media tips. Since the whitelisting runs off Twitter lists, we’ll soon experiment with fast-tracking tweets from journalists on the ground and trusted eyewitnesses. We’ve just launched a sister Twitter account called @breaking that we’re using to tweet eyewitness photos and video, as well as communicate with people on the scene. And we’re building a crowdsourcing layer over the top of it, allowing anyone to “spot” breaking news stories just like our editors. These are exciting times in journalism.
(Again, full disclosure, I work at breakingnews.com and @breakingnews)