Curating and Contextualizing Twitter Stories to Assist with Social Newsgathering Arkaitz Zubiaga Computer Science Department Queens College and Graduate Center City University of New York New York, NY, USA arkaitz@zubiaga.org Heng Ji Computer Science Department Queens College and Graduate Center City University of New York New York, NY, USA hengjicuny@gmail.com Kevin Knight Computer Science Department Information Sciences Institute Univ. of Southern California Marina del Rey, CA, USA knight@isi.edu ABSTRACT While journalism is evolving toward a rather open-minded participatory paradigm, social media presents overwhelming streams of data that make it difficult to identify the informa- tion of a journalist’s interest. Given the increasing interest of journalists in broadening and democratizing news by in- corporating social media sources, we have developed Tweet- Gathering, a prototype tool that provides curated and con- textualized access to news stories on Twitter. This tool was built with the aim of assisting journalists both with gathering and with researching news stories as users comment on them. Five journalism professionals who tested the tool found help- ful characteristics that could assist them with gathering addi- tional facts on breaking news, as well as facilitating discovery of potential information sources such as witnesses in the ge- ographical locations of news. Author Keywords newsgathering, user-interface, social media, trends, scoop ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m Information Systems: Information Interfaces and Presentation - Miscellaneous INTRODUCTION Social media is steadily growing as it gains importance as an information source to learn about current affairs. More specifically, the microblogging service Twitter, where users can post short messages known as tweets, is becoming the par excellence social media to catch up on recent news and events. The brevity of tweets and the increasing usage of mo- bile devices are facilitating to quickly share information from anywhere at anytime, and thus make Twitter the first venue where news break in many cases, anticipating news media [19]. This phenomenon is giving rise to an ever stronger citi- zen journalism, where millions of users share about, discuss, comment on and illustrate recent happenings on a daily ba- sis. The participation of a large community of users enables Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IUI’13, March 19–22, 2013, Santa Monica, California, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1015-4/12/05...$10.00. access to an unprecedented volume of real-time information, constituting a gold mine for journalists to research the news and search for sources for ideal news reporting. Journalists constantly track numerous sources with the aim of discovering and researching breaking news stories as soon as they happen. This process is known as newsgathering, by which they try to collect as much information and sources as they can for a subsequent well-researched news reporting step. While journalists have traditionally relied on authorita- tive information sources for newsgathering, the growth of so- cial media is picking up steam as an additional participatory information source fed by citizens. In addition, collecting in- formation by citizens in social media allows to approach to the readers by reporting news in a broader, more democratic, and culturally more relevant way [29]. Furthermore, taking advantage of information and media shared by citizens en- ables extensive coverage of news as never seen before due to limited reach of journalists themselves, both geographi- cally and culturally. However, this open participation often produces an overwhelming amount of informal and noisy in- formation, which makes it difficult to identify and grasp the main contents. Despite the potential existence of valuable and sometimes unique information in that mess, some journalists are still skeptical about using social media as a source, given the endeavor needed to curate its contents. With the aim of making newsgathering from social media an easier experience, especially for journalists, we have devel- oped TweetGathering, a tool for curated and contextualized access to Twitter stories early on as news break. Distilling Twitter, an open platform where users can share and com- ment on all kinds of matters, often riddled with pointless chat- ter, we provide enhanced access to trending stories that are likely to be newsworthy. The enhancements include curation of contents for faster access to salient information, addition of context for easier understanding of events that are not fa- miliar to the reader, and improved access to contributors for the discovery of potential sources such as witnesses. Five journalism professionals were invited to test the tool. By interviewing them and evaluating their user experience, we have found numerous features and visualizations that could be helpful to journalists in the social newsgathering process. TweetGathering is expected to assist collecting additional facts on breaking news, as well as facilitating discovery of potential information sources such as witnesses in the geo- graphical locations of news.