A pair of South African entrepreneurs has been selected as winners of the Knight News Challenge. Haroon Meer and Mohamed Nanabhay created signalnoi.se, a Web service which tracks the progress of stories through media and social networks.
The Knight Foundation, based in the US, supports and funds projects that innovate or improve journalism and media services. The Knight News Challenge is an annual competition for start-up projects in the media industry, looking for innovation in media networks or data journalism. Some of the winners, including signalnoi.se, receive grants or funding from the foundation to help bring products to market.
Signalnoi.se tracks and scores stories across a publisher's own Web site, their competitors', and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in real-time. A story's development can also be graphed over time periods from as short as a few minutes, to days or weeks.
The service is aimed at publishers, but has potential for other users, such as brand owners tracking engagement online. The service graphs engagement and popularity, helping publishers identify hot stories and adapt coverage to the needs of their audience. “Separating the signal from the noise,” as the service's Web site puts it.
Signalnoi.se was founded by Mohamed Nanabhay and Haroon Meer. Nanabhay was the head of online at Al Jazeera English. He had the idea for signalnoi.se during the Arab Spring, where the importance of news from Egypt was quickly identified as the most engaging issue, over a developing story about leaked Palestinian documents. The news service was able to quickly realign its coverage to focus on the more topical stories - signalnoi.se attempts to apply a formal process to help publishers make similar decisions.
Meer is a security expert and founder of Thinkst Applied Research. He previously featured as a headline speaker at the ITWeb Security Summit.
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