For the last several months, the social news startup BreakingNews — where I work — has been growing our editorial team to filter and verify breaking news from the growing avalanche of real-time information. Most news organizations ask viewers to send them eyewitness photos and video, but we’re trying a different approach: since many eyewitnesses are already sharing their firsthand accounts via social media, our goal is to discover, verify and point to them as quickly as possible.
Today we launched a new BreakingNews.com that encourages the crowd to help us do just that. Using the same tools as our editors, users can search and submit eyewitness reports. Those submissions — along with Twitter tips from 160 news organizations and counting — land in a new column on the home page where users can vote for their favorites. If a story is new, original and accurate, editors promote it to the main feed, mobile apps and potentially @breakingnews, Facebook and other social channels. For international stories, they may appear on the home page of MSN UK.
We’ve also jazzed up the design, rebuilding the site in HTML 5 to adapt to mobile and tablet browsers. A new “popular” tab (above) showcases trending stories. If an item contains a photo or video clip, you can click to see the media embedded in-stream. And it’s easier to share stories, too.
You may remember Clay Shirky’s groundbreaking talk back in 2008, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.” I think it’s safe to predict in a year or two — given the astronomical growth of smart phones and social media adoption — that the volume of eyewitness breaking news reports will be staggering. Using a 24/7 team of editors, technology and the crowd, our goal is to provide that real-time filter for news as it happens.
Poynter has published a story about the new site, and there are more details in this blog post. Yesterday, the BreakingNews team rolled out a new iPhone app (we’ve been busy) with custom feeds, real-time mapping and some other goodies.
(Double full disclosure: I work at BreakingNews, which is part of the msnbc digital network.)