INSIDE BREAKING NEWS

We’ve received many requests for an updated version of the free BreakingNews Android app, and we’re happy to announce it’s now live in both the Android Market and Amazon Appstore.  This is a big update: we’ve added customized feeds, real-time mapping, a cleaner display, and it’s now optimized for the Kindle Fire, to boot.  In short, it’s the fastest way to discover breaking news as it happens, wherever you are.

(The home and map views on Android phones)

Every minute of the day and night, our editorial team scans social media and hundreds of news sources for the first word of breaking news.  As we discover and verify stories, we publish quick updates with links to the originating sources.  Since journalists are powering our apps — not robots — we’re able to offer unmatched, reliable coverage and social media filtering in real-time.  We publish a much greater volume of updates on our apps than our social channels.  And if you’ve activated push alerts, we’ll ping you on the biggest stories.

When you see a story or topic you’d like to track — such as the latest news around the elections or the Occupy movement — you can create your own customized feed by saving it to “my topics.”  To view the latest breaking news stories on a global map, select “places” (phone only).

(BreakingNews’ updated Android app is optimized for the Kindle Fire)

We also recently updated our iPhone app, and we offer a Windows 7 app, as well.  You can download any of our mobile apps here.

Please let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more mobile features coming in the weeks to come.

Whitney Houston’s death Saturday night took many people by surprise. Unlike other recent high-profile deaths, like those of Steve Jobs and Etta James, this news seemed to come from out of the blue.

AP was the first traditional organization to publish an alert with the news that night, and our editors quickly pushed their report out to our mobile users and across BreakingNews’ social channels.

Mobile traffic to the BreakingNews apps and mobile site exploded after we sent out our push alert. In total, we saw twice the number of mobile visits compared to desktop website visits on Saturday.

That first tweet we sent out had a link to AP’s report, which has been clicked on 119,000 times according to Twitter Analytics. It has been retweeted just under 7,300 times. According to Topsy Labs data, that link was the most retweeted article after the news broke, with 14,000 posts including it.

In total, we tweeted 11 updates on Saturday night with seven links pointing outward to news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times and The Huffington Post. Those links have generated a combined 290,000 clicks. We pushed out two more breaking updates on Sunday, including news that Houston’s daughter had been rushed to the hospital. That link to CBS News’ report has received nearly 54,000 clicks.

We can’t take all the credit for these high click-rates. Twitter Analytics only shows the total clicks on a link and doesn’t parse out the impact of individual tweets. But we’ve heard from several colleagues who’ve attributed their traffic spikes, in part, to our promotion of their content. And it’s worth noting that we’re only measuring Twitter clicks here, not clicks from Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, our website and mobile apps.

As we announced earlier this month, Breaking News is sending more than 100,000 referrals a day to news sites and social services. Our mission is to help time-crunched users navigate the sometimes confusing vortex of breaking news information. By distributing links, we serve users and reward content originators with traffic and a burst of social followers.

(Post by Lauren McCullough, @lfmccullough; Photo by Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images file)

Attention New Yorkers: BreakingNews’ Lauren McCullough will be joining a panel of colleagues at Social Media Week New York on Feb. 16 at noon for a candid discussion about ways traditional news organizations can incubate innovation in their culture.

The panel, “Creating Start-Ups Inside Traditional News Organizations,” follows a keynote address from Buzzfeed’s founder and CEO Jonah Peretti on the future of sharing.

NBC News’ Senior Director of Digital Media Ryan Osborn will lead a conversation on three case studies from NBC News and msnbc.com – EveryBlock, NBC Latino and BreakingNews.

McCullough, EveryBlock President Brian Addison and NBC Latino Executive Editor Chris Peña will share the benefits and challenges of building out their operations.

The panel is free and registration is open-to-all: http://bit.ly/SMWStartUps

Follow the panel on Twitter at #SMWStartUps.

Background:

BreakingNews brings you the biggest stories as they happen, 24 hours a day, from hundreds of news and eyewitness sources across the globe. We’re a startup inside msnbc.com, but we’re a fully independent, agnostic news organization with editors in Seattle, New York and London.

EveryBlock is the best way to follow neighborhood news and connect with your neighbors in 16 U.S. cities. Their goal is to help you be a better neighbor, by giving you frequently updated neighborhood news, plus tools to have meaningful conversations with neighbors. EveryBlock was originally funded by a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation through its Knight News Challenge program. It is now wholly owned by msnbc.com.

NBC Latino, a division of NBC News, focuses on English-language news, information and lifestyle content, offering Hispanic angles on big general market stories, and the site will also be home to Hispanic perspectives and opinion pieces. The goal of the NBCLatino.com is to tell and reflect the Hispanic-American story with authentic voices, and make NBC the brand of choice for Hispanics across mobile, online and TV. The project is underway now at http://nbclatino.tumblr.com/, and the official site launch is planned for spring of 2012.

Sky News has issued a new policy that restricts how employees use their personal Twitter accounts, The Guardian reports. Sky News staff can no longer retweet rival journalists or post news updates outside their own beats.  An email to staff explains, “Always pass breaking news lines to the news desk before posting them on social media networks” with the goal “to ensure that our journalism is joined up across platforms.”

On its surface, that may sound like a good strategy, but the distributed world of journalism has changed the game.  For example, take Neal Mann, a journalist who has broken many stories on his personal Twitter account, ranging from Libya and Egypt to the London riots.  He’s best known as @fieldproducer, amassing nearly 40,000 followers in his role as digital media editor at Sky News.  We’ve retweeted and linked him several times on BreakingNews.  His fast, distributed style of social reporting has made him the face of Sky News on Twitter — or as one journalist put it, “No one has promoted the Sky News brand on twitter better than @fieldproducer.”

There’s something to that idea. The International Journal of Communication conducted an in-depth study that looked at how people responded to Twitter reports from news brands and journalists during Arab Spring.  TheNextWeb summarizes, “While all major mainstream media outlets have a strong presence on Twitter, some with millions of followers, when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience.”

Humanizing our own @breakingnews account is one of our priorities, and we openly encourage our editors to freely tweet on their own accounts by pointing out other reporting, providing context and openly engaging with people who have questions or concerns.  We’d like our editors to be known as experts in breaking news, and expertise thrives beyond the confines of a single news organization’s reporting.  In social media, old broadcast rules do not apply.  And it’s OK to be human.

(Written by @corybe)

@BreakingNews Thanks for melting our servers, ya jerks. ^JK

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) February 2, 2012

The Atlantic jokingly sent us this tweet today after we sent out their story on the Susan G. Komen foundation.  Over the last few months, we’ve noticed that we’re sending increasing amounts of traffic to news sites. 

How much traffic?  We’re now sending more than 100,000 referrals a day to news sites and social services.  That’s the combined total from BreakingNews.com, our mobile apps, social accounts and partnerships with sites like MSN UK and msnbc.com.  That doesn’t count the new social followers, too.  And we’re growing fast.

If you’re a news site, these referrals will be difficult to track.  In your analytics software, you’ll see the referrals from BreakingNews.com, but you’ll be unable to attribute the visits from our mobile apps, social accounts and our distribution partners. In other words, we’re probably sending you a lot more traffic than you think.

All this is a good reminder for news sites to ensure you’re part of our “fast-track” tipping program.  And please let us know if you have any questions.

(Post by @corybe)

We’ve passed a big milestone over on Breaking News’ Facebook page: 100,000 likes!

True, this is a pretty modest Facebook audience compared to many other major brands. But unlike some of those brands, Breaking News is still a relatively new entity in the news ecosystem. We launched our Facebook page on June 11, 2010. Like many newer brands, we face the challenge of growing our page’s audience without the support of an established, traditional publishing channel and with a modest marketing budget. Sound familiar?

We’re celebrating this 100,000 likes milestone (and more milestones to come) because we think we’ve honed in on a Facebook strategy that is delivering real results – higher engagement, stronger viral sharing and clear audience growth.

Based on our case study over the last few months, we’re sharing five tips to help you grow your Facebook page’s audience from scratch.

TIP 1: Metrics are your new best friend.

Facebook has really beefed up their Insights offering over the last six months, making huge swaths of detailed information available for export as well as easy dashboard viewing. Clearly, we all care about growing our likes. But in order to gain audience, you have to determine what activities contribute the most to that growth.

The good news: You don’t have to guess!

Here are the main categories of metrics we watch closely as we look for correlations to like spikes: 

1. Volume of posts (per day and per month);
2. Stories created (“stories” are likes, comments and shares on a post);
3. Reach (the number of unique users who saw our posts, either organically in their News Feed or Ticker, directly on our page, paid or virally from a friend’s like, comment, share);
4. Impressions (Facebook’s aspirational metric for possible times your posts could have been viewed);
5.  Link clicks (how many times users clicked on URLs accompanying posts).

TIP 2: Map out a straightforward strategy with actionable goals that everyone buys in to.

Breaking news: Not everyone on your team is as obsessed with perfecting a Facebook post as you are. Getting everyone to buy in to your plan is key, and you can do that with a to-the-point strategy that focuses clearly on a small number of tactics that serve your main goal (growing likes). Identify clear actions everyone can take as part of their daily routines. Also identify how you will measure the success/failure of those actions.

This shouldn’t overwhelm your team and should keep everyone focused on actions that are truly important.

Here’s an example from our strategy document:

THEORY TO TEST: We can reach a higher number of Facebook users on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

PROPOSED ACTION: We posted 85 times on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays in October: We posted 43 posts on 4 Fridays; 27 posts on 5 Saturdays; and 15 posts on 5 Sundays.

Let’s aim to increase our monthly total Friday-Saturday-Sunday output to 120 posts (~30% increase), with an average of 10 posts per day.

HOW WE’LL MEASURE: We’ll compare our month-over-month Reach and Impression metrics.

TIP 3: Experiment with posting photos and asking Questions.

A few months back, several folks on the Breaking News team noticed that photos being shared in our personal News Feeds seemed to be standing out more. We decided to start experimenting with uploading images directly to our page (instead of linking out to them), and we’ve seen a huge boost in engagement and sharing as a result. Photos as a peg to share news work really well on Facebook, especially when the photos are unique.

Facebook Questions have proven to be a great way to get our Facebook audience talking about breaking news, especially when the question is related to a “talker” story. Generally, we try to ask at least 2 Questions a week on our page. We try to keep them short and easy to answer. We try to avoid Questions that ask users to second-guess court rulings or arrests, and we also try to avoid Questions that would require the user to be an expert on the subject-matter.

TIP 4: Experiment with Facebook advertising.

We’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads, flighting campaigns in small bursts to discover the most bang for our buck. For some campaigns, we tied it to an ongoing story in the news. In others, we used Facebook’s “sponsored story” product to plug the overall page. In all instances, we discovered social ads – only served to people whose friends have already liked the page – proved to be the most effective way to draw engaged fans at an affordable rate. Overall, we spent a very modest amount of money to expedite our growth.

TIP 5: Test, learn, adapt (repeat).

The key to any goal-setting process is to be agile. Breaking News on Facebook isn’t perfect, and we don’t claim to have all the answers. What we do have is a process to test and measure our theories for growing likes. This structure allows us to experiment and learn and then experiment again. We’re looking at our Facebook performance every month and we’re tweaking based on the results we’re seeing. We can brainstorm new experiments and plug them into the existing structure that our team has bought in to. In many ways, this kind of discipline is an even bigger win than passing 100,000 likes.

(Post by Lauren McCullough, @lfmccullough)

Updated: Incorrect reports that long-time Penn St. coach Joe Paterno had passed away Saturday night were picked up and re-transmitted by, among others, us at BreakingNews and @breakingnews. We soon learned those reports were wrong, and we owe you and the Paterno family both an apology and an explanation.

Our editor noted that CBS Sports — a trusted source — reported Paterno’s death around 9pm ET. The CBS Sports headline and story was based, seemingly, on erroneous reporting by the Penn State student publication ‘Onward State.’ The original CBS Sports obituary didn’t directly attribute the student paper.  The Huffington Post followed with a story.

However, during the evening, Onward State’s twitter feed reported it twice, first saying that Penn State football players had received an email ‘informing them of Paterno’s passing.’  A second tweet said ‘our sources’ can confirm that the coach had died at age 85. Those accounts were soon dismissed by the family.  We quickly reported the dismissal and later news that the managing editor of ‘Onward State’ had resigned.

We decided to delete the original tweet and Facebook posts (we updated the post on Google+) because those posts were shared hundreds of times, and we didn’t want to perpetuate the rumor.  For more on how the CBS report sparked reports across the web, here’s a timeline of what happened, assembled by Poynter.org’s Jeff Sonderman.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a note.

Update: CBS Sports has since published an apology.

(Post by Tom Brew, @thomasbrew)

It goes without saying, but it’s been an incredible news year.  Here at BreakingNews, we’ve compiled the biggest breaking stories of the year — the stories that drove the biggest traffic spikes, the most @breakingnews retweets, the fastest stream of updates, the most social media reports and some of the most stunning eyewitness YouTube clips:

7. East Coast earthquake - A rather minor earthquake isn’t going to make many “top news stories” lists, but the rare August 23rd tremor that shook the East Coast was unexpected enough to crash BreakingNews.com.  The quake set a record for the most simultaneous users visiting the site — most within a few minutes — as well as the most activity we’ve seen in our Facebook chats (1,000+ comments in a couple hours.)  And it was the first story that bubbled across Twitter so fast, people saw tweets about the quake before feeling it themselves.

6. Norway attacks - When a bomb exploded in the middle of Oslo, Norway on July 22nd, dozens of residents snapped photos and recorded videos.  While we furiously posted updates from citizen reports and Norwegian news sites, we started to hear about a second tragedy: a shooting at a youth camp on an island outside Oslo.  Together, this story ranked in our top 5 traffic events for the year.

5. Steve Jobs dies - A six-word tweet, “Apple says Steve Jobs has died,” sparked shock and disbelief across Twitter.  In fact, it set our all-time record for the most @breakingnews retweets with an incredible social outpouring across the globe: 11,000 retweets and 10,000 new Twitter followers in just a few hours time.  We’ve never witnessed such an immediate social reaction to any story we’ve posted.

4. Joplin tornado - We were first alerted to the impending tragedy on May 22nd with this tweet from @stormchaser4850, “**MULTIPLE VORTEX TORNADO REPORTED NEAR JOPLIN, MISSOURI** TAKE COVER IMMEDIATELY!!”  Moments later, the damage reports began to stream in: hospital on fire, neighborhoods wiped off the map.  We discovered this chilling YouTube clip moments after it was posted — the terrifying sounds of people huddled in the back of a convenience store, praying above the deafening wind.  Amazingly, they survived, but 160 others lost their lives in one of the most devastating tornadoes in U.S. history. 

3. Arab Spring - We’ve posted more updates on the protests and violence in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen than any other story in 2011: over 5,000 in all (which you can review as a historical timeline of the events in each country).  The protests sparked more social media reports of any international story to date: the steady stream of citizen tweets, photos and videos told stories that reporters were unable to reach. (A special thanks to Andy Carvin for his terrific work curating and crowdsourcing many of those reports.)  The Arab Spring may always be known as the true starting point for social-powered citizen reporting.

2. Osama bin Laden killed - It wasn’t our biggest traffic event or even our most-retweeted story (we retweeted @nytimes on this story), but President Obama’s stunning Sunday night announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death triggered 111 updates on BreakingNews.com before sunrise the next morning.  That’s the most updates our team has posted on a single story over such a short period of time. It was also one of our most-difficult editorial decisions: we saw tweet after tweet with rumors and half-confirmations of bin Laden’s death, but we waited several minutes for an official confirmation before publishing it.

1. Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis - When a tsunami swept Japan after one of the largest earthquakes in modern times, the world watched in awe as surreal video and photos showed entire towns swept away.  Throughout the night U.S. time, our team published updates from Japanese media while linking YouTube clips and Twitpics moments after they were posted — like this one which how has 16 million views— and BreakingNews.com’s traffic went on to set an all-time record before noon the next day.  This remains our biggest traffic event in our history, our largest jump in Twitter followers (+25,000 in two days alone) and the story that introduced many people to BreakingNews’ real-time coverage.

Make sure you’ve downloaded one of our mobile apps (we just relaunched our iPhone app) to be alerted when the next big story breaks.