Curating and Contextualizing Twitter Stories to Assist with Social Newsgathering

Arkaitz Zubiaga, Heng Ji, Kevin Knight

IUI. 2013.

While journalism is evolving toward a rather open-minded participatory paradigm, social media presents overwhelming streams of data that make it difficult to identify the information of a journalist's interest. Given the increasing interest of journalists in broadening and democratizing news by incorporating social media sources, we have developed TweetGathering, a prototype tool that provides curated and contextualized access to news stories on Twitter. This tool was built with the aim of assisting journalists both with gathering and with researching news stories as users comment on them. Having the tool tested by five journalism professionals who we interviewed, we have found that the tool is effective in assisting journalists with gathering additional facts on breaking news, as well as facilitating discovery of potential information sources such as witnesses in the geographical locations of news.