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Earlier this year, several producers at CNN received an alert from a new digital news-gathering tool that they were testing: A teenager in Los Angeles had posted a tweet saying that the pop music heartthrob Justin Bieber had been arrested.
CNN’s Los Angeles bureau followed up on the tip by calling the appropriate local precinct. The police said that they were pursuing an attempted robbery complaint against Mr. Bieber, but wanted to know how the cable news network could possibly have known that.
The answer is Dataminr, a software tool aimed specifically at analyzing billions of Twitter postings for patterns that could indicate breaking news. On Tuesday, Dataminr becomes commercially available to news organizations, some of which — like CNN and Gannett — have already been testing the software.
“On the whole this is one of the best technical tools we have,” said Richard T. Griffiths, senior editorial director at CNN. “Besides our local affiliates, it is probably our best source of story leads, and you live or die by your leads.”...
Big data is helping journalism uncover leads.