The Press Association (PA), the UK’s leading multimedia news agency, has started a three month pilot with RTreporter (www.rtreporter.com) – an early warning system for detecting news on Twitter. PA will use the Twitter dashboard in its newsroom and several other departments.
After the Dutch ANP, which has been using RTreporter since the beginning of 2014, PA is the second news agency to adopt this technology.
In newsrooms all over the world Twitter has become one of the leading sources for news. Not only is it useful for tracking stories related to celebrities, politicians and events, but journalists themselves are using Twitter as a way to keep in touch with their audiences. However, monitoring and curating the sheer millions of tweets put out daily is still proving to be a very difficult task.
The RTreporter system assists journalists from various PA departments in finding news or newsworthy items through Twitter. The Dutch start-up RTreporter uses algorithms and semantic analysis to scan, filter and arrange UK tweets and visualize them in a dashboard.
Tony Watson, Managing Director of PA, said: “We believe that tools like RTreporter can give news agencies an edge in finding news first. This technology can also help us raise awareness in the newsroom that social media is an important source of news”.
Bert Kok, one of the founders of RTreporter, said: “We are working closely with news agencies like PA and ANP on the further development of the dashboard. We strongly feel that newsrooms need automation to help them in the news gathering process and cope with the ever growing number of news sources. With RTreporter we can help them with that”.
The Press Association
he Press Association is the UK’s leading multimedia news agency and digital content supplier.
As well as being the home of the UK’s national newswire – which supplies news to national and regional newspapers, magazines and broadcasters – the Press Association has evolved as a provider of tailored multimedia content solutions for a broad range of businesses, brands and public sector organisations. PA’s products and services span everything from sports data APIs, hosted live blogs, and social media content to media training, page production services and TV listings. www.pressassociation.com.
PA Group Limited
Headquartered in London, PA Group incorporates news, information and communications businesses which includes the Press Association – the national news agency of the UK and Ireland.
PA Group has 27 shareholders, most of whom are UK national and regional newspaper publishers. The biggest shareholders are dmg media Limited, News UK plc, Trinity Mirror plc and United Business Media plc.
RTreporter
RTreporter is the result of corporation between the mathematics and linguistics department of the VU University in Amsterdam and ORTEC, one of the largest providers of advanced planning and optimization solutions. Extensive scientific research has resulted in mathematical and linguistic algorithms that automatically scan Twitter in any language required.
RTreporter is since 2013 in use in the newsroom of most popular news site in the Netherlands, NU.nl. Since the end of 2013 the ANP is the first news agency that has integrated the Twitter dashboard in its news gathering process. www.rtreporter.com
About ORTEC
ORTEC is one of the largest providers of advanced planning and optimization solutions and services. ORTEC’s products and services result in optimized fleet routing and dispatch, vehicle and pallet loading, workforce scheduling, delivery forecasting, logistics network planning and warehouse control. ORTEC offers stand-alone, custom-made and SAP® certified and embedded solutions, supported by strategic partnerships. ORTEC has over 1, 800 customers worldwide, 700 employees and offices in Europe, North America, South America and the Pacific Region. www.ortec.com
