CNN and Twitter Become Official Partners, Said To ‘Revolutionize’ News Gatherings

It appears that head Twitter’s head of news, Vivian Schiller, has announced their first project, namely a partnership with CNN and the New York startup Dataminr. It is said that the partnership, along with Dataminr, will help journalists cover breaking news and making sense of the flood of public information on Twitter.

Dataminr is a five-year-old startup that has raised $48 million from investors like Box Group, Venrock and IVP. Until now it has worked with clients in financial services, helping banks and hedge funds make real-time investment decisions by processing huge amounts of social media content and extracting the high-value information. Dataminr uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the Twitter firehose of data and highlight the needle in the haystack so CNN reporters can find the most important, relevant, and reliable facts and images from around the world.

“There is actually a very different set of algorithms that help us determine if information spreading on Twitter will move markets, as opposed to becoming a big news story,” said Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey. “So it’s not a matter of more or less data, but of how the service is focused and tuned.”

CNN is one of the companies that set up Twitter accounts in their news gathering since 2009. Now it wants to bring a purpose-built product and official partnership. For example, CNN first learned about a shooting this weekend at a mall in Maryland through Dataminr, which has been deployed in-house for several months now, and picked up on a tweet from a first responder on the scene. The alert helped CNN be one of the first on the story. The company says it now produces about two stories a day based off tips from its Dataminr alerts.

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