CNN announced a new partnership with Twitter and New-York based technology company Dataminr Wednesday.
As our sister-site Lost Remote reports, “Dataminr for News” will offer CNN a leg up on the competition by expanding traditional news tips from phone and email to Twitter.
Dataminr uses an advanced algorithm to home in on similar sets of tweets around the world, thus alerting its clients to trends—or breaking news— potentially from the moment it’s first tweeted about.
“It is really about how we gather news,” CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker said at a press event announcing the launch. “At our core, that is who we are and what we are about. News-gathering is the key to everything that we do, and that is what we are very focused on.”
“We think it is revolutionary for newsgathering,” SVP of CNN.com K.C. Estenson said, jokingly calling it to “bionic vision for our reporters.”
The network has already been testing the program for six months, using it on-air for about two stories a day, including this past weekend’s Maryland mall shooting, and during the Nelson Mandela memorial service, when Dataminr alerted CNN to the most shared Mandela photos online. CNN then used those photos on-air.
Will the revolution stop at just newsgathering? The network says there are no plans to build specific segments or shows around the service.