New BreakingNews.com adds stream of user tips for crowd ranking

Poynter reporting:
News as a public process, rather than the polished output of a magic journalism box, is one of the big ideas in journalism innovation. But what exactly does that look like?

The new homepage of BreakingNews.com has a stream of incoming tips and suggested stories.

The people at BreakingNews.com are taking a stab at answering that question in a redesign launching Thursday afternoon. The site’s main feature remains the same — a center column aggregating the world’s latest breaking news stories, as picked by editors. But a new column to the right has a raw feed of unverified story leads the audience can help to sort through.
This acts as a “real-time inbox of tips,” which come through the website from users or through Twitter from about 160 news organizations who signed up to submit tips by including #breaking or #breakingnews hashtags. Site visitors can upvote the most urgent items to call them to an editor’s attention. The goal is speed: to identify important news with the community’s help faster than a few editors could on their own.
“We’ve hired a 24/7 team of editors who immerse themselves in this with three screens and are tracking every bit of news they can find … but at some point we’re going to reach a natural upper limit,” Breaking News director Cory Bergman told me. “We’re only going to see an increase of eyewitness reports posted to social media — we know this is going to balloon over the next few years, and we really need the crowd’s help in being able to identify it.”
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