Following the social media crowd to discover news stories
With Janette Lehmann (UPF), Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo!) and Ethan Zuckerman (MIT Civic Media), we developed an automatic method (pdf, blog post) that groups together all the users who tweet a particular news item, and later detects new contents posted by them that are related to the original news item.
We call each such group a transient news crowd. The beauty of this approach, in addition to being fully automatic, is that there is no need to pre-define topics and the crowd becomes available immediately, allowing journalists to cover news beats incorporating the shifts of interest of their audiences.
