PA starts pilot with Twitter dashboard RTreporter

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”.