Can Media Take Tips from Twitter? Techmeme's Experience as Case Study
Can media organizations leverage the social web to get story tips faster than they could through traditional methods? A number of news aggregators believe so and are looking to Twitter for tips.
Six weeks ago popular tech news aggregator Techmeme began accepting story tips submitted on Twitter. Today PopURLs, an older and more diverse aggregator, began doing the same thing. This is probably just the beginning; so many journalists are on Twitter that it only makes sense that people will systematize the harvesting of news tips. The early experiment at Techmeme indicates though that the long tail of Twitter tips may not be so long after all. A handful of Twitter users are dominating the system.
Everybody Wants in the Game
Techmeme and PopURLs won't be the last organizations to lean on Twitter for news. We've learned that Techmeme competitor Techfuga will roll out the same feature next week and Firefox bookmarking plug-in Shareaholic will be including a button to send tips to Techmeme as well. Techfuga will be building its index using Twitter tips, which is similar to how the already established Techmeme is using the system.
Allen Stern at CenterNetworks has added a "techmeme tip" button at the end of all his blog posts and a handful of other top tech blogs have said they will be doing the same. Just like mainstream media outlets have added "Digg this" buttons to their sites, we're sure they'll be leveraging Twitter for tips soon as well.
How Are Sites Dealing With Twitter Tips?
Techmeme is a flurry of activity, updating every 5 minutes most hours day and night. It's edited primarily by a complex algorithm years in the works and in part by its new human editor Megan McCarthy. Tips are submitted to the site via Twitter by adding "tips @techmeme" to any post with a link in it. McCarthy's exact role in putting stories on the front page of the site is mysterious but she's got some hand in it. Tipped headlines are sometimes pushed to the site manually and sometimes they make it there automatically, site founder Gabe Rivera told us.
PopURLS, on the other hand, doesn't use any human intervention. Twitter tips there just augment the company's existing Twitter hotness tracker. That site then feeds into PopURLs.
Far more journalists are presumably trolling Twitter for unsubmitted news tips. We've been doing that for more than a year and Sky News just hired a correspondent who is working Twitter full time.
Who is Doing the Tipping?
We've gathered the numbers below from the last 7 days of Twitter tips to Techmeme.
We looked at the last 500 tweeted tips and here's what we saw.
- They were submitted by 110 different people.
- 44% of those submissions came from one man, a Bay Area engineer in the health insurance industry named Atul Arora. (Atul submitted 224 tips to Techmeme in the last week.)
- 17% of the tips came from Mrinal Desai, an early LinkedIn employee and now co-founder at tech help company CrossLoop.
- Those two men make 61% of the tips to Techmeme. The remaining 39% of the tips come from a list of 108 other people, most of whom have only made one or two tips in the last week.
How are those tips working out? Do Arora and Desai dominate the accepted submissions as well? In fact they do, though only a small percentage of their tips go up on Techmeme.
- Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera pushed some buttons and told us that 19 submitters have had 91 tips hit Techmeme in the last week.
- We went through each day's archive at noon and midnight PST and were able to identify 66 tipped stories contributed by 14 people.
- Atul Arora submitted 52% of those headlines, giving him a 15% success rate.
- Mrinal Desai submitted 21% of the tipped headlines, giving him a 16% success rate.
- Jeff Crites (BrickandClick), the community manager at Army.mil, submitted 5% of the tipped stories we found.
- That means that 78% of the tipped stories on Techmeme came from 3 out of 110 people who submitted tips over the last 7 days.
Those seem to us like numbers that could discourage most people from submitting tips, but maybe discouragement is unwarranted. Rivera says that the top tippers have a lot more visibility than they have influence. Many of the stories they submit would have made it on to the site anyway because they are from major news outlets whose big stories get discussed on other blogs already - that's the primary way that stories have always hit Techmeme.
Indeed Atul Arora acknowledges this. In an email this afternoon he told us:
WSJ & NY Times push articles to wsj.com/tech and nytimes.com/tech late in the evening PST. You can always tip these articles and have your name show up on techmeme. I am guilty of doing so a number of times. Even if I don't tip some of these articles will show up on Techmeme because sites like NYTimes/WSJ are probably trusted sources for Techmeme. I am sure Gabe and Megan do look out for such behavior and make sure that this method of tipping is not abused.
Gabe and Megan are watching out for abuses of the system. Rivera says the best tips are to relatively obscure sites that Techmeme wouldn't have found otherwise and points to a number of cases where that's exactly what Atul and Desai have done.
Is This System Good for the Media Getting Tips?
We wonder though, whether the system really is proving effective at Techmeme. 110 people posting tips in 7 days doesn't seem like a lot to us for a site with as many readers as Techmeme has, but it's hard to know how to judge that number. For tips and hits to be so dominated by a small number of tipsters, some of whom are posting a lot of tips to news that the system would have found anyway could be discouraging to new tipsters.
"I hope people don't get that impression because the 'top' tippers actually hold no fundamental advantage," Rivera told us. He expects more people will start tipping the big stories and that will both speed up Techmeme and give those tipsters increased visibility. Neither tipping a lot nor success in tipping gives extra impact to a person's Techmeme tips in the future. "Both [Arora and Desai] also uncover somewhat more obscure things," Rivera told us. "That's where their influence is."
That's where the hope for Twitter tips lies, too. People discovering obscure news and sharing it with their favorite news outlet. Hopefully that's something that an increasing number and diversity of people will start doing. Rivera is convinced that Twitter tips are good for Techmeme, but so far we're not sure how well they're working.
"Remember, unlike Digg, Techmeme doesn't need submissions to work," Rivera adds. "So tips only serve to fill in gaps. They're a modest remedy to a modest problem. Since they help improve Techmeme a little every day, it's clear they're helpful, and I expect their benefit to grow as more people become aware of them. When you tip Techmeme, you're making a little bit of a wager in public. You're telling all of your followers that you think a story should get on Techmeme. I think that discourages many people from tipping enough that we'll never see Digg-volume submissions. But it does serve to improve the quality of the average tip."
It's early days and Twitter is an incredibly dynamic phenomenon. You can help Twitter and Techmeme become even better by adding "tip @techmeme" to the hot tech news posts you Twitter about. You can give a good story a bump on PopURLs by Tweeting "@popurls here goes the title http://example.com". Whether the practice will catch on remains to be seen.
Thanks to Scott Macdonald for the reporter birdy pic and Pat2001 for the picture of Rivera.
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As a former - occasionally sometimes current (come on Foreign Policy, put my damned interview up) - journalist I think you asked the right questions, Marshall. And the conclusion I've come to is: No. That is, aggregator sites are not going to be valuable to journalists, at least not non-tech journalists.
Instead, I believe that individual journalists are no doubt tapping into their own Twitter streams (call them sources - that's what they are) for story ideas.
I once did a survey of Twitter use by journalists (in link above) and the one reality was that _as organizations_ media was using Twitter overwhelmingly as an advertising vehicle and delivery system, which surprised me - I was thinking there'd be much more story sifting.
But, as I say, I believe that's done a) by individual journalists and b) via those journalists' individual (trusted) Twitter streams and _not_ via aggregators.
It's not surprising that so few people account for so many of the tips. Participation inequality is a well known phenomenon. Wikipedia is one of the more extreme examples, yet it's also a fantastic source of information. In the end, it doesn't matter so much if it's only a few people contributing, if the people contributing are submitting great stuff.
Andrew: I agree in general. However, even a quick look at the tips will show it's overwhelmingly tech news. If you're interested in politics, economics, or - G-d help you - archaeology, then virtually none of these people are 'contributing good stuff.' As a professional, if my beat is the judiciary, for instance, or sports, or theatre, or Indian Country affairs or _anything but tech_ this particular aggregator, as it currently stands, is not useful to me as a journalist. I personally doubt it will substantially change.
So it's a good point about "participation inequality" overall, but as a tool for journalists (the topic of the post) Techmeme (the primary example in the post) is of virtually no utility because this inequality is not of people alone but also of topic. (Not to mention that real news sources will often provide you not with hardly-yet-covered news but not-at-all-covered news, will provide you with scoops, in other words.)
Curt, have you spent much time on memeorandum.com - techmeme's political sister site?
I've found Twitter to be a good source for story ideas. News tips, not so much. Twitter is better for "you are there" information when news breaks (albeit unconfirmed). E-mail tips come from a much larger pool of submitters and aren't limited to 140 characters, so you get much more initial information.
Marshall - thanks. I dont do anything different particularly - I read a lot and have, over time, figured out ways to use my tools. I always shared (first email, now social networks) with my friends and now 'tip @techmeme' is just another 'friend'
Appropriately, this post took a detour through Mrinal's Twitter feed on the way to Techmeme. :-)
One thing I should emphasize: the first person to tip a headline is the one who gets credited on Techmeme. Hope nobody assumes otherwise when you mention dominant tipsters "discouraging" new tipsters. (I know you meant something else...)
Thanks for mentioning CN Marshall. I can tell you that the button hasn't been used. Today was the first time I got a "lead" from a tip from Atul. I am not sure if the reason for the lack of button usage is due to my audience not reading TM or if it's too new for people to know what to do with it.
I've done by own scratchpad research on how the tips work and how they help get a story on tm. Rather than share the research now, my hope is to find Gabe at sxsw (not sure if he is attending) and get a video where he can answer my questions.
We last spoke at tc50 and it was a good conversation although I am starting to believe that his algo has been tweaked a lot since that chat. So I have lots of questions for him.
I am still waiting for the tip leaderboard :) - as long as you know which site is on top, it probably can't be far off.
Great article - I've thought several times about doing a blog post on how often "atul" shows up for Techmeme tips. I was beginning to think it was an automated system somehow.
I guess I"m #3 on the top 'Techmeme Tipster' list. LOL. As opposed to any nefarious use of the tip system or attemtp to game it ... I merely know it exists, and when I find an interesting article, check Techemem to see if it's there - and it's not - I'll send the ocassional tip.
BTW, Techmeme is the third place I check each morning, after email and Twitter. Gives me the best snapshot of interesting and relevant tech related stories, and I tell anyone who wants to 'be in the know' that they simply have to check it multiple times a day. Great job Gabe. And hats off to you for using Twitter to tap a tip line. Once enough people are aware of both Techmeme and the tipping ability, I think you'll see people like me dropping off the top tip list rather quickly. :-)
@BrickandClick
Also ... Atul's prolific tipping (for attention, just like the 'me too' bloggers ... there has to be incentive) aside ... the advantage of accepting tips from Twitter users is obvious: speed, in addition to surfacing some stories that may not see much light of day. Sure, many of the tipped stories will "eventually" make it to the leaderboard. But isn't speed important? If human involvement - the use of tipping Tweeples and Techmeme's lone breathing editor - bubbles up stories faster, it hopefully adds value. Techmeme was smart to add the tipping element, but it may want to consider a limit on the number of tips per person per week (Atul, you are now limited to 175 tips per week ;-)
Excellent article. I have been networking with twitter for a couple of weeks now and I have met a bunch of interesting people. It is a great place to network with like minded people.
http://twitter.com/spryka
We last spoke at tc50 and it was a good conversation although I am starting to believe that his algo has been tweaked a lot since that chat. So I have lots of questions for him.
Great article!!
This is very informative.I like it.