Online newspaper replaces journalists with social media bots

The site uses the concept of ‘crowdsourcing’ -using popular comments posted on social media sites such as Twitter- to distribute relevant news to readers of local newspaper sites in five US cities.

Tewspaper uses publicly available APIs to automatically trawl social media sites for local news covering Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York City.  

One of the local sites, Baltimore News, brings algorithmically filtered news to people in Tewspaper's home town. Each local site also has national news coverage in a variety of subjects such as business, entertainment, and sports.  

"We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens," said Jared Lamb, the creator of Tewspaper.  

Another obstacle Tewspaper had to overcome was the limited content it could locate for each story. To solve this problem, the website automatically matches images to related stories. Tewspaper determines the optimal image to display for every story based upon the author, subject, headline text, date, links, and other context. 

www.tewspaper.com

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