News tips reinvented as social media signals
How ‘nearby tips’ help us find and make sense of breaking news
When people see breaking news, they often tip their favorite newsroom. At least, that’s the way it’s worked for decades. But with the advent of social media, people are tipping each other, sharing the breaking news they see with their friends.
Today newsrooms occasionally get tipped over social media itself, but for the most part, the challenge is quickly finding and making sense of breaking news buried deep in Twitter, Periscope, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
That’s why we took a different approach to tipping in the Breaking News app, using real-life observations as signals to help us discover breaking news on social media faster than ever before.
We call them “nearby tips,” and you can share them from the Breaking News app with just a couple taps. You don’t have to type anything, take a photo or record a video. Similar to Waze, you just tap a category like police activity, protest or power outage. In just five seconds time, you’re sharing a simple, anonymous observation tied to your location.
That simplicity is part of the magic, attracting a much higher volume of tips that other news apps. Just two months after launch, Breaking News has received tips from more than 90 countries and all 50 U.S. states.
Users are not just tipping Breaking News editors, they’re tipping each other. Each tip is shared with other users who are physically nearby — along with stories our editors post and tweets they curate — helping people understand what’s happening around them.
At the same time, all of the tips stream into our curation platform, Velocity, each tagged with a specific location around the globe. We also have them wired into an internal Slack channel:
These tips are not stories in themselves, they point to possible stories emerging in early stages on social media.
On July 14th, two “lots of sirens” tips were shared in rapid succession from Nice, France. On the map, the tips were posted from opposite ends of the Promenade des Anglais. That was the signal:
Our editors searched social media with the word “promenade” while looking for any geotagged posts along the waterfront. At first it was quiet, then eyewitness reports began to pour in. Piecing together what happened, we published the first news reports on the story and sent a push notification to Breaking News users in the Nice area explaining what was happening.
Since we rolled out tipping in May, we’ve discovered hundreds of stories, large and small. But it’s still a challenge knowing which tips to prioritize over others, and there are too many incoming tips for our editors to chase.
Spikes in tips are the strongest signals. When a 5.6 earthquake rattled Oklahoma on Saturday, more than 100 people from five states tapped the “earthquake” tip button in the Breaking News app over a span of a few minutes. The first tip was logged just 15 seconds after the start of the quake.
It was remarkable to see the wide distribution of quake tips. Here’s the Dallas-Fort Worth area, 250 miles to the south of the epicenter:
A few weeks earlier, a light 3.1 quake in a Los Angeles neighborhood sparked a remarkably narrow cluster of tips:
Wildfires, severe weather and power outages trigger similar but slower spikes, especially in major metro areas. Here’s 24-hours of tips surrounding the Blue Cut fire in San Bernardino County, CA:
Location is also a signal; when a user inside an airport taps “evacuation,” for example, it gets our attention. Like these two tips after a security breach and evacuation at Frankfurt Airport in Germany last month:
And a “fire” tip from the Dubai airport, which turned out to be an Emirates airliner on fire on the runway:
A “loud boom” tip in a high-risk area, like Kabul, Afghanistan, gets special attention. This was a suicide bombing:
Tips along a shoreline often signal that something is happening in the water, like the cruise ship fire in San Juan, Puerto Rico last month:
But more often than not, it’s not obvious which tips relate to real stories. They’re often single, isolated tips that precede any reporting — or they’re so rural, there will be no reports at all. Sometimes, they’re fake. When we search, nothing’s there.
That’s why we just launched a novel way to begin filtering tips for credibility.
On Friday night, a single Breaking News app user in Davao City, Philippines tapped the tip button followed by “loud boom.”
Seconds later the tip appeared in front of Breaking News editors, mapped to a location less than a mile away from an explosion at an outside market that ultimately claimed 14 lives and injured dozens more.
In this case, Breaking News editors were already on the story, curating the first social media reports. It was clear that this tip was the real deal, so we tapped the new “thank you” button next to the tip in Velocity, and the tipster automatically received a personal push notification signed by the editor.
It looks like this:
At the same time, Velocity remembers that this person helped us on a story. He or she is now a trusted tipster. Subsequent tips from trusted users are now accompanied with a star badge in Velocity and Slack that tell us the tips are more credible than most:
We also know when some tips are fake, enabling us to penalize users in the other direction. It not only creates a credibility filter to help prioritize incoming tips, but it also reinforcing the best tipping behavior, laying the groundwork for a community.
With augmented reality, virtual objects are layered over the real word. With nearby tipping, real-world observations are layered over social media, helping both people nearby and our own newsroom make sense of what’s happening.
Over the next few months, we’ll be experimenting with new ways to strengthen the credibility filter, foster a tipping community and extend tipping into new places. The more credible tips shared, the more stories we uncover in early stages, expediting our ability to alert people when breaking news impacts their lives, companies, employees and assets around the world.
(Breaking News makes sense of news in real time. Trusted by the largest newsrooms and security teams, Breaking News is available in an app, website and real-time API. To learn more, send us a note.)
