In an effort to harness social chatter and integrate it with traditional reporting, In Context, a strategic business consultancy, has acquired the rights to Crowdynews, a social media aggregator.
A first for South Africa and Africa, the Dutch technology amplifies the user experience of online media, converging both the conversation of crowds with professional reporting.
‚”Citizens are the world’s largest editorial team,” says Mar√≠ Lategan, In Context’s Founder and Managing Partner. “”They are on-the-ground creating and sharing content via social media just consider when news of Oscar’s Valentine’s killing broke. This creates a conundrum for editors: risk publishing unreliable citizen sources in breaking news stories, or disregard the social media wire and report ‘old news'””
Crowdynews addresses this by adding a new dimension to the editorial eco-system. It works by intelligently aggregating social media conversations both local and international – and then filtering them into a real-time feed tailored to an editor’s preferences.
‚””It’s impossible for newsrooms to be everywhere,”” says Jeroen Zanen, co-founder. “”Crowdynews balances the tussle between professional reporting and citizen journalism. For instance, on reporting about the conflict in Syria, the most relevant and popular public perspectives can be shared, in real-time, alongside an article of the same topic. This greatly enriches the publication’s readability as users receive a snapshot of views from both factual and actual sources.‚””
Since being developed in 2010, Crowdynews has become the technology partner to some of the world’s biggest news agencies in the US, Russia and Asia with successful integration into the editorial offering of Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Denver Post, The Malaysian Insider and Montreal Gazette, etc. Very recently, GateHouse Media, Inc., headquartered in New York and one of the largest publishers of locally-based print and online media in the US, signed-up to use Crowdynews’ technology to implement social media integration on all of its websites.
From a South African perspective, Lategan says ‚””we see Crowdynews as a game-changer: a state-of-the-art product that takes publishing from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0.‚””
Displayed on-screen as a widget, Crowdynews can be filtered to track specific topics and trends in three different ways:
Article widget: Filters and displays most relevant tweets to an article:
Breaking Burner: Searches the social media web and aggregates conversations from YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Vimeo, Tumblr and youtube around a specific topic:
Amplifinder: Based on Breaking Burner technology, tweets around a specified topic are ranked based on engagement e.g. retweets and shares.
Crowdynews also engages users to increase time on site as well as directs traffic from external sources into the publication via shared links. ‚””This is extremely beneficial for publishers who are looking for innovative ways in which to retain their audiences,‚”” says Lategan.
There are no set-up fees. Instead, Crowdynews works on a shared revenue model based on advertising performance. Monthly revenue isn’t fixed and is split 50/50 with the publisher. And the more pages on which the widget lives, the higher the revenue will be.
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