Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) Mathematics department have recently developed an automated news detection system for Twitter called RTreporter, which can help journalists outscoop other media outlets.

RTreporter helps journalists find developing news stories extremely quickly, by analysing, organising, and clustering thousands of Twitter messages per second, highlighting topics which strongly increase in virality in a very short time.

The RTreporter system is already being used by nu.nl, the most visited news website in The Netherlands (5,2 million unique visitors per month).

According to their chief social editor Mark Vos, "We can make an early assessment of the development of an incident and the news value. This process is, thanks to RTreporter, much faster than before."

The project was undertaken by crossmedia company CCinq and a project team from the VU, who worked together to develop an algorithm which allows for automated news detection.

Source: VU University Amsterdam