Newspaper replaces writers with search algorithm

by Gareth Jones, revolutionmagazine.com 25-Aug-09, 11:14

LONDON - Tewspaper, an online newspaper, has launched replacing journalists with an algorithm that scours social media sites for relevant news.

The ‘crowdsourced' newspaper uses publicly available APIs to trawl social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to provide users in five US cities with the latest news in their area.

Tewspaper is not endorsed or sponsored by any social network sites, but uses proprietry technology to filter through the large amounts of obscure data on social networking sites to identify relevant information.

"We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter," said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper. "From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,"

Because of the limited amount of relevant content on social media sites like Twitter, Tewspaper automatically matches images to related stories to provide users with a richer experience. Tewspaper determines the optimal image to display for every story based upon the author, subject, headline text, date, links, and other context.

Tewspaper currently covers five major US cities: Baltimore, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. However, its reach is set to grow throughout the remainder of the year.

Comments

Trevor Schoenfeld - 25/08/2009

"I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here." Griffin Mill, 'The Player'.