INSIDE BREAKING NEWS

Announcing two more places where you can get Breaking News’ coverage. Google Currents has added Breaking News to the top of its “curators” category (below left), and you can subscribe to receive our latest stories.

Over on Flipboard (above right), you may already be seeing Breaking News’ curation if you’ve connected your Twitter or Facebook accounts (and you follow us there.)  But we’ve been added to Flipboard’s news category for those who want to add Breaking News separately.

For news organizations that tip Breaking News, both of these additions expand the distribution potential of your original stories.  We’re sending well over 100K clicks a day to news orgs and eyewitness accounts.

By the way, if you like to receive breaking news alerts in real-time on your phone or tablet — with push alerts — download one of our free mobile apps for iPhone, Android or the Kindle Fire.

Last week a Seattle-area woman allegedly stabbed her boyfriend and abducted the couple’s two young kids, triggering an Amber Alert.  Seattle news organizations quickly responded across platforms, publishing up-to-minute updates on Twitter with the suspect and vehicle descriptions using the hashtag #AmberAlert. 

“People want to do anything they can to help in a case where children might be at risk,” explains Evonne Benedict, who heads up social media for KING TV in Seattle.  “Retweeting and sharing is a quick and viral way for them to answer the ‘call to action.’”

Evonne said KING TV first learned of last week’s Amber Alert from a tweet from law enforcement.  Several hours later, the two children were found safe and sound.

That gave us an idea here at BreakingNews. Since speed is critical in getting out the word on Amber Alerts, we’ve created a new BreakingNews.com feature that automatically displays tweets from news organizations that contain the #AmberAlert hashtag.  This enables our editors to quickly learn of an Amber Alert and publish the most critical alerts across our growing network of social channels and mobile apps. 

Washington police issue Amber Alert for 3 and 7-year-old girls believed to be taken by woman - @KIRO7Seattle bit.ly/KtyijV

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) May 3, 2012

We’re using the same system that enables news organizations to tip us with the #breaking and #breakingnews hashtags.  Nearly 200 news organizations are using the hashtags to quickly surface original breaking stories to a larger audience — to the tune of over 100,000 clicks a day. 

If you’re a news organization that wants to participate in both the #breakingnews and #amberalert program, please send us a note with your Twitter handle so we can whitelist it into our platform. 

Post by @corybe 

We’re all familiar with TV news tickers, scrolling along the bottom of news channels.  But what if a ticker only appeared for a few moments when a story breaks?  And what if it worked across all live TV channels?  Here at Breaking News, we’ve created a connected TV app that does just that.

First, you’ll need a Samsung TV set or internet-connected Blu-ray player.  The “Breaking News” app is available for free from the Samsung TV Apps Store, which is the largest of its kind among connected TV sets.  Once you’ve downloaded and launched the app, you’re ready to go. When a story breaks, a ticker will appear along the bottom of the screen for a few seconds, scrolling the breaking story.  Then it will disappear.  And it works across any live TV channel you’re watching.  Nifty.

If you prefer a constant ticker, you can set the app to do that, too.  Or if you prefer a Breaking News “screen saver” of sorts for your TV set, it will vertically scroll the latest breaking stories in a full-screen display (this is the only mode available for Samsung Blu-ray players.)  If you’d like, you can also browse the latest stories in the app by topic.

The ticker features the same lightning-fast updates you see on BreakingNews.com, our mobile apps, @breakingnews on Twitter, Facebook.com/breakingnews and our other social channels.  As always, we’re careful to credit the originator.  As viewers see a breaking story in the ticker, they can flip to their favorite news channel for live coverage.

It’s now available in the US, and the app will roll out internationally by early next week.  This is a bit of an experiment for us, so give the app a try (if you have a Samsung TV) and let us know what you think.

(Post by @corybe)

Big thanks to @TIME for including us in their list of 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2012! #Twitter140

— Breaking News Storm (@breakingstorm) March 21, 2012

Yay!  Here’s the full list from Time.  By the way, we have two other category Twitter accounts: @breakingnewsUK and @breakingpol.

In the early stages of breaking news, there’s often a tremendous amount of conflicting information. Take this afternoon’s shooting at a psychiatric clinic in Pittsburgh as a prime example.  For well over an hour, victim counts varied, and rumors of a second gunman and hostages dominated Twitter and even some media reports.

Here at BreakingNews, we use an internal chat tool  — a “backchannel” — to evaluate and confirm updates in real-time.  This is just a small slice of the chat (below) during a time in which Lauren Mccullough and Stephanie Clary were trying to get to the bottom of a rumor that a gunman had taken one or more hostages by reaching out to media sources. 

But first, let’s set the stage on how we were tracking the story.  We’re already following all the Pittsburgh local media on Twitter, and we quickly followed the hospital account.  We set up persistent searches against WPIC, UPMC and Presby — all local location names for the shooting location — to see eyewitness reports. We used our BreakingNews.com tool to search for social updates, geo-targeted to Pittsburgh, against a variety of keywords.  We constantly refreshed the websites of the Pittsburgh newspaper and TV stations, and we listened to live feeds from one TV stations and a radio station.  And of course, we’re monitoring the wire services, too.

About 30 minutes into the story, we saw an increasing volume of tweets claiming that a second gunman had taken one or more hostages.  All but one local news organization held off reporting it, and that’s where we pick up our backchannel chat.  Lauren and Stephanie DM’d media sources to ask the source of the news, and with conflicting reports, they decided to hold off on the TV station’s report.  “It’s all over the place,” Stephanie said, “My feeling is to hold off a bit.”  Turns out, there were no hostages and no second gunman.

This slice of conversation took just a few seconds — the chat spanning the story is several pages long — and it enables our team to communicate quickly and make split-second news judgment decisions even though we’re located in three different cities (Seattle, NYC and London).  Often, when false rumors are gaining momentum, we’ll send out a warning.  And during big stories, we’ll bring a bit of the backchannel to @breaking, our team account.  Think of BreakingNews as a real-time “gut check” over the social web, providing trustworthy coverage at the speed of Twitter. 

(Post by Cory Bergman, @corybe on Twitter)

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new politics vertical on Twitter, @breakingpol.

Breaking Politics will capture breaking news around US and international politics. This includes campaign and election news, as well as updates on political initiatives and mandates. Our team will be curating from hundreds of news organizations and journalists, 24-hours a day, and linking back to the original sources of the content. As we wrote about last month, BreakingNews sends more than 100,000 referrals a day out to news sites and social services.

You can expect to see a lot of updates today on the US 2012 presidential election, as 10 states are holding their Republican primaries. You also can follow an even more in-depth feed of Super Tuesday breaking news updates on BreakingNews.com.

(Post by Lauren McCullough, @lfmccullough)

We all know how many people are following a Twitter account, but there’s one influential metric that you rarely see: retweets.  TrackSocial has a running leaderboard of the most-retweeted brands on Twitter, and our own @breakingnews account is #5.  Here’s the top 10 list:

1. Joyce Meyer Ministries
2. ESPN
3. Joel Osteen Ministries
4. Miami Heat
5. Breaking News
6. NBA
7. CNN Breaking News
8. Los Angeles Lakers
9. Chicago Bulls
10. BBC Breaking News

Inspirational tweets, sports and breaking news dominate the list.  Social Media Today has put together a good analysis here.

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.