In an effort to harness social chatter and integrate it with traditional reporting, In Context has acquired the rights to Crowdynews, a Dutch-developed technology that serves as a social media aggregator.
Breaking news as it happens is the pursuit of any publisher, yet, with the rise of social media, editors are being scooped by their own readers.
So says Mari Lategan, founder and managing partner of strategic business consultancy company, In Context.
Crowdynews, the first technology of its kind in SA and Africa, according to Lategan, amplifies user experience of online media by converging the conversations of crowds - locally and internationally - with professional reporting.
"It then filters these topics into real-time feeds tailored to an editor's preference," she adds.
Displayed on-screen as a widget, Lategan explains that Crowdynews can be filtered to track specific topics and trends in three different ways: Article Widget, which filters and displays the most relevant tweets to an article; Breaking Burner, which searches the social media Web and aggregates conversations from YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo and Tumblr around a specific topic; and Amplifinder, which ranks tweets around a specific topic based on engagement, eg re-tweets and shares, she adds.
Crowdynews also engages users to increase time spent on sites and directs traffic from external sources to the publication via shared links.
"This is extremely beneficial for publishers who are looking for innovative ways in which to retain their audiences," explains Lategan.
From a reporter's perspective, she says, social media conversations can be used as 'news lists'. "Conversations are intelligently aggregated and not just random tweets This enables a reporter to create more content around their readers' specific interests in a topic," she explains.
There are no set-up fees, states Lategan; instead, Crowdynewsworks on a shared revenue model based on advertising performance. Monthly revenue isn't fixed and is split 50/50 with the publisher. And the more pages on which the widget lives, the higher the revenue will be.
According to Lategan, the technology is currently being introduced to a number of media owners in SA with the hope of going live within the next few months.
Co-founder of Crowdynews, Jeroen Zanen, adds that, since being developed in 2010, Crowdynews has become a technology partner to The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, The Malaysian Insider and Montreal Gazette.
"It is impossible for newsrooms to be everywhere, he notes, Crowdynews balances the tussle between professional reporting and citizen journalism. For instance, on reporting about the conflict in Syria, the most relevant and popular public perspectives can be shared in real-time, alongside an article of the same topic," he adds.
Social media is here to stay, observes Lategan. "This is proven by the fact that 200 million tweets are sent every day. Publishers can't keep up with this pace, but they can't rely on it as a reliable source either. Crowdynews intelligently balances this dynamic by integrating professional reporting with the social media wire," she concludes.
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