Author Archives: Paul Quigley

We want to hire a great designer

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NewsWhip is looking for a UI/UX designer to join our Dublin-based team, full time. We want to make thoughtful design and interaction central to how we do everything, so we can promise a rewarding and exciting role.
What is NewsWhip?
NewsWhip is a startup that tracks the world’s news on social networks. Each day, we monitor the stories people are sharing and talking about on Facebook and Twitter, and serve up the most popular stories in dozens of niches, topics and countries.
Through our professional tool, Spike, we deliver streams of data on trending news stories to hundreds of journalists at our client companies including Guardian News & Media, Huffington Post, Yahoo! and Think Progress. We’re funded by a consortium of international and Irish investors.
What’s the job?
We want a talented, imaginative designer to grab our UI/UX by the scruff of its neck, scrub it, dunk it, smack it, squeeze it, massage it, listen to it, gently encourage it, and polish it into something brilliant. And then keep tweaking it so it stays brilliant.
This is a full time position with significant creative control. In the next six months you’ll be leading design work on projects including:
  • Making changes to UI and features in Spike, based on user feedback, testing and customer interviews.
  • Opening up our consumer site functionality, and working on our widgets for our off-site network.
  • Engineering our user journey and signup flow. We have great products but we’re still working on getting them under people’s noses. Intelligent user journey design will be a big part of getting this right.
  • Mobile app design, including planning better Facebook and Twitter integration for our apps and bringing a user experience perspective to further product development.
  • Some brochure and other graphic design for marketing materials.
We are a small team who work next to each other and go out of the way to help each other, so you’ll have great support. We currently work with a fantastic US-based consultant designer who will be on hand to work with you on the bigger projects and get you up to speed on our work to date.
What are you looking for?
  • We will prefer candidates with at least 2 years work experience but we’re also open to meeting talented recent graduates with strong portfolios.
  • Good academic pedigree is great. But we’re more interested in what you have done and can do. So we’d ask to see live sites and/or apps you’ve designed.
  • Photoshop and visual design skills are essential. Front end skills (HTML, Javascript) are a nice bonus.
  • Open attitude and the ability to listen to feedback.
  • Some project management ability. While we’ll be here to support and work with you, you’ll be largely managing your own workload.
What’s in it for me?
  • Salary: negotiable, but solid. We don’t expect you to work for pot noodles. This is a funded company with revenue.
  • This is a full time position.
  • Employee share ownership plan participation. Pending board approval, you’ll get to participate in earning a small slice of the company.
  • Great working environment. Right now we’re in DogPatch Labs, a fantastic co-working space on Barrow street funded by a US venture capital firm. At some point we’ll be moving to our own space, likely in the city centre.
How do I apply?
Email your resume, a link to your portfolio, and a cover letter telling us why you’re interested to jobs@newswhip.com. You can address it to me (Paul). All applications will be treated with strict confidentiality.
We’ll assess applications on a rolling basis – sooner the better. We hope to start meeting potential applicants the week of Monday May 6th.

Real time conversation view: Spike shows you the chatter round any story

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We get tremendous satisfaction from the fact that the NewsWhip Spike dashboard helps hundreds of journalists and other communicators find the stories getting traction each hour. Nothing beats making something that’s loved.

Here’s our latest new feature, as requested by several of our users: real time conversation view.

Real time conversation view adds a new layer of information for Spike users. Once you’ve spotted a trending story of interest, click on the tab below it to see all the tweets mentioning the story, and see what’s being said about it live.

Spike displays the most popular (retweeted, favorited) tweets mentioning the story, mixed with the most recent. You can drill down, click around, and overall get an exact picture of what people on Twitter are saying about the story.

Here’s a story on Tony Blair’s reaction to celebration parties held following the death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher. Below it, a recent tweet mentioning the story.

And you can zoom in to see dozens of the reactions to the story, and see why it’s trending. With this piece, the story being popular on Twitter does not seem to equate with Tony’s popularity:

Here’s some reaction to news that a Greek government document envisages reclaiming WWI and WWII reparations from Germany. Some users just re-tweet the headline. But a good number add their own commentary, giving it instant color.

Sometimes the reaction on Twitter might reveal the “real” story, and reveal why a story is trending. Spike user and Social Media Editor at USA Today Mary Nahorniak recently told us about how this worked in the USA Today newsroom with a story about Costco:

“Last week a trending headline on Spike was simply, “Costco Profit Soars.” The editor I was working with wondered why that was popular on social media, and a quick scan of the comments made it clear that the social element was that this news was coming just days after Costco’s CEO spoke out about minimum wage. Every Twitter post made that connection.

In my newsroom, we often ask, “What are people saying about this story?” This is one more way of getting at that answer.”

And last but not least, the live view lets you see the inevitable Twitter, eh, humour that emerges after a story breaks. Here’s some droll comments on today’s news that the US Navy shot down a drone with a laser beam. Complete with inevitable Star Wars comparisons.

As an extra bonus in our live view, users can click the Facebook “F” to see exactly how much sharing, liking and commenting activity each trending story is getting.

Next in the pipeline for Spike users is our rather awesome and granular alerts system. We’ll be rolling it out to our users in the next few weeks.

If you haven’t already, sign up for a free trial of Spike now – takes about a minute, saves a great deal of time (and open tabs) for staying on top of the stories that are matter now to all the other humans.

- Paul

 

Left v. Right: Who’s got the biggest social guns?

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Each day, NewsWhip gathers piles of data on the social metrics around each news story. We publish the tip of the iceberg on NewsWhip, and give professionals a deeper look into the data through Spike.

We took a sample of a week in the life of some of the leading left- and right-wing news sources we track. Our sample selection was based on sources that are (i) US-based, (ii) obviously liberal/progressive (left) or conservative (right), and (iii) trend a good bit on our own front page. After running the leading sources for a Sunday to Sunday period – October 21 to 27 – here are our winners:

(As you may notice, our bubbles in section 1 are not to scale, the numbers tell the story.)

Overall, the left is beating the right – largely because of the sheer heft of The Huffington Post, on which we’ve published data before. The HuffPo is a social distribution behemoth.

On the right side, The Blaze is making up serious ground. Many of the conservative sites that are getting traction there are new, including Twitchy.com, which tends to focus on Twitter conversations and turn these into shareable news stories. The biggest conservative news source, The Drudge Report, isn’t represented as it doesn’t publish any news for us to track.

We’ve deliberately excluded plenty of “mainstream media” sources that people on either side might consider to be biased the other way. I think if we get too far into the middle, it becomes very debatable whether a source is left or right. Whatever color your glasses are tinted, we hope you can agree that the above sources skew one way or the other.

To stay on top of the big social news trends, try NewsWhip Spike: spike.newswhip.com

To keep in touch with us, follow @newswhip on Twitter

 

How do you rank the world’s most social news sources?

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Yesterday, BuzzFeed published our ranking of the most social news sources in the world, using Facebook data gathered by NewsWhip Spike on October 1st for news published in September. These are fascinating lists – showing the publishers getting the highest volume of Facebook interactions: likes, shares, and comments.


Publisher Number of Facebook Interactions, September 2012
1 huffingtonpost.com 5058808
2 yahoo.com 2860095
3 nytimes.com 2534225
4 buzzfeed.com 2400613
5 bbc.co.uk 2265701
6 dailymail.co.uk 1921655
7 CNN (inc. CNN Money, Fortune) 1860544
8 foxnews.com 1653066
9 guardian.co.uk 1389109
10 abcnews.com 1221558
11 thinkprogress.org 1189016
12 theonion.com 1064359
13 NBC (inc MSNBC, NBC News) 1040143
14 wimp.com 1005110
15 espn.go.com 763211
16 usatoday.com 704815
17 theatlantic.com 703714
18 washingtonpost.com 691673
19 telegraph.co.uk 683142
20 reuters.com 662248
21 forbes.com 631178
22 gawker.com 621831
23 mashable.com 599239
24 jezebel.com 586201
25 latimes.com 577919
26 dailycaller.com 576693
27 rt.com 559482
28 cbsnews.com 531843
29 motherjones.com 501007
30 tmz.com 476106
31 businessinsider.com 472565
32 gizmodo.com 439209
33 people.com 434016
34 deadspin.com 425941
35 bloomberg.com 425318
36 cracked.com 420379
37 salon.com 416327
38 rollingstone.com 391620
39 io9.com 367174
40 alternet.org 349974
41 engadget.com 332247
42 techcrunch.com 314563
43 wsj.com 302517
44 independent.co.uk 284805
45 dailykos.com 283331
46 nationalgeographic.com 266014
47 nydailynews.com 260473
48 thestar.com 258480
49 wired.com 251811
50 washingtontimes.com 251556

We also gave BuzzFeed our data on the publishers producing the most stories getting over 100 Facebook and Twitter interactions, giving in another data table, and another angle on who is getting the biggest social footprint.

Our data raised some questions yesterday, as several editors got in touch asking about sites that did not make the top list, when their internal data would put them there. By our tracking, the sites mentioned were not in the top 50, though all were right on the edge. (To clarify our data on some of the relevant sites, we put put: slate.com at 249,050 interactions (209 over 100), politico.com at 242,105 (228 over 100), and thedailybeast.com at 234,684 interactions (218 over 100).

That’s not to say they don’t belong higher up on the table. Our data isn’t perfect, and it’s quite strictly defined. To explain:

1. Data excludes sharing after October 1. This is important for publishers with stories with a longer social half life. We tracked stories published during the month of September, and sharing activity on those stories during that month. Any sharing activity that happened after October 1 for stories published during September is not included. This could hurt publishers whose stories spread for longer. But we need some cut off date to compare apples with apples.

2. Content finding imperfections. On average, Newswhip Spike finds and tracks all or almost all of the content published by each site – we estimate 98% on average. Sometimes that figure can drop a good deal lower, particularly if a site reorganises its structure in some way, or branches into new sub-sites. We apologise to anyone who was hard done by on this ranking due to missed content – that’s entirely on us to get right. We’re auditing constantly to sharpen up discovery – we obviously want 100% coverage of everything.

3. We don’t go behind paywalls. For WSJ and FT: It’s hard to track content that’s behind a paywall, and it doesn’t always work. WSJ still does well by our measurements though, thanks to all its free content.

Finally, the first table of our data published on BuzzFeed did not unite brands publishing into multiple domains (e.g. msnbc.com, nbcnews.com, nbcnewyork) into a single domain (“NBC News”). We’ll try to do this with brands in future rankings, but we won’t unite everyone into one parent company unless they’re parts of a single branded publisher. (Otherwise we just get huge, nonsensical blocks of data for Time, News Corp, Gannett, etc.)

We’re auditing our coverage of existing sites over the next six weeks, so that will improve the quality of any future rankings by making sure less content slips between the cracks. We’ll never get every story from every site, but we’ll keep aiming for it.

Also, we’re adding about 2,000 regional US publishers to Spike next month, which should give some very interesting regional stats.

Updates: Brian Ries of The Daily Beast puts their story count >100 Facebook interactions at 445, much higher than our own count This is for September content but without the October 1 cutoff for new data that we applied.

Jeremy Stahl of Slate sent on data showing that Slate published more stories than we caught back in September, so we don’t have all their content for that month. Looks like we missed many of Slate’s popular blogs, such as the XX, which produce some real social hits. We’ll get these in for any future rankings.

Probably Slate are not alone – as we said above, our content finding systems are (and will remain) a work in progress. If you are a news publisher and would like to have your website indexed by NewsWhip, please email spike@newswhip.com.

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Get ahead of the world’s trending news on NewsWhip Spike, the global social dashboard. Keep up with NewsWhip on Twitter.

Spike is now in open beta

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We’ve spent a lot of time developing our pro product, Spike, with the input of over 600 newsrooms, journalists and other media professionals across the world. Now, we’re opening it up to the world.

For a limited period, anyone can use the full power of NewsWhip’s viral news tracking technology, no sign-up required. Check it out now and see what you think of some of our advanced features:

  • Publisher view: track the stories generating the most social heat for any of dozens of publications. Great for online-focused newsrooms keeping score with the competition.
  • 1-hour view: a story can spread to millions of people while you’re out for lunch. Keep on top of the very latest stories with this new feature.
  • Spike search: want to go deeper into the world’s trending news? Spike can show you what’s trending for any search term – so whether it’s cats, cars or charities that interest you, Spike can tell you what the world thinks about your topic of interest.

The open beta will last until November 7th. Until then, users can sign up at any time to keep using Spike after the open beta ends. Here’s the link for Spike: http://spike.newswhip.com/

User feedback is important to us, so if you have a comment, suggestion or bug report, please get in touch at spike@newswhip.com.

Keep in touch! Follow NewsWhip on Facebook and Twitter.

And the most talked about news in Brazil right now is…

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NewsWhip is now multi-lingual, showing the fastest spreading, most social news now in non-English language markets. First up: NewsWhip Brazil and NewsWhip Portugal.

Through the help of various friends and translators, we’ve got a big translation operation underway. NewsWhip will soon be showing you what’s trending locally in  France, Germany, Spain, with more markets to follow.

We believe NewsWhip can be a global technology where a billion social network users and all their tweets and shares point the way to the best news stories as they emerge. But we can’t complete that vision unless we go global and get out of our English language comfort zone. Through some great friends and connections here in Dublin, we’ve got translators and editors to work on the world. The first results are the excellent NewsWhip Brasil and NewsWhip Portugal, with sources curated by our friend Priscilla. (Hat tip.)

Any friends you think might enjoy these pages? Please pass them on.

collage via: alexdecarvalho

 

 

Come try out Spike

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Today, over 500 journalists and other media professionals are trialing out our pro product, Spike. Spike is a social dashboard with granular information about all of the world’s socially trending news.

We got another 100 sign ups in the last week alone. Now people from CNN, BBC, NBC, the HuffPo and elsewhere are using Spike to stay on top of news trends.

It’s good to have the big boys aboard. But what’s even more interesting is how diverse the Spike user base is becoming. Today it will be used by TV producers, talk radio researchers, freelance journalists and PR firms.

We started building a platform for digital journalists. But somewhere along the way we realized how useful it would be for anyone who works in media and cares about the world’s real time news conversations.

Today, we’ve even added search functionality. It’s awesomely powerful. For the first time, you can see every single trending cat on the internet. Or every story about Romney or Obama ranked based on their real time social metrics.

Anyway – I know I’m biased but I really think this is very very cool. If you work in media, please come try it out. Here’s the sign up page for the running trial:  http://www.newswhip.com/SpikeTrial

If you’d like to read more about Spike, here’s a writeup on it from Journalism.co.uk.

We’re hiring: Jack of all Trades at NewsWhip

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NewsWhip Media is seeking a new member for our Dublin-based team, with responsibilities in communications, content management, marketing and sales work.

What does NewsWhip do all day?

NewsWhip is a technology that ranks news stories purely based on their real-time social popularity. It tracks how many shares, tweets, comments and other interactions tens of thousands of news stories have, hour by hour, day by day. You can see the tip of the iceberg at NewsWhip.com

After newsrooms asked us for faster, more granular data, we developed NewsWhip Spike, a much more detailed and faster tool that allows newsrooms to see what’s about to trend in different topics, what’s taking off on competitor sites, and what’s emerging on YouTube and other viral content sources. Today, clients using NewsWhip Spike include NBC, BBC, Buzzfeed, USA Today, and RTE.

Right now we’re working with newsrooms on improving Spike, we’re putting the finishing touches on our iPhone and Android apps, we’re developing foreign language capacity (NewsWhip en Francais), and we’re adding loads of new publications to our system to be monitored.

Responsibilities:

Hello, new Jack (or Jill) of all tades at NewsWhip. We’ll come up with a more official job title for you when you join. But right now something informal like this is the best description. You’re joining a very small team, so you’ll be mucking in on everything.

Each day, your responsibilities will involve some combination of the following:

- Communications, including drafting blog posts, preparing marketing emails, editing or drafting press releases, and creating social media posts.

- Classifying publications and creating rules for classifying stories into our system, in a logical and clear way. This involves work in Microsoft Excel, and some simple online tools which we will train you in. You may soon be managing the work flow of others doing this task.

- Smart clerical work, helping us prune our database and make sure everything in NewsWhip is working well. You do not need a coding background for this, but you will need good attention to detail and an ability to work systematically and attentively.

- Creating sales plans, deck pitches, and other business documentation. If you can make a good PowerPoint presentation or work with graphics or charts, that will be useful.

We’ll supply all the training you’ll need on using our systems and on our processes.

Perks:

The experience you’ll get with a rapidly growing startup is second to none. We think deeply about our business and industry and every day make dozens of decisions on design, priorities, sales, and marketing. We’re the first movers in a space that (we think) will be huge in the future. As the company grows, so will your responsibility. If everything goes well, you may find yourself with a good deal of autonomy quickly.

We work in DogPatch Labs, in a room full of other dynamic startup companies, all trying to conquer the world with new technologies and ideas. Coffee, beer, snacks and fresh fruit are all supplied for free. It’s a great place to be.

Pay for the position is competitive with high level graduate salaries (€28k range), and you’ll be eligible after some time to apply for our employee stock ownership plan. The successful applicant for the job will begin with a trial period – likely 6 months.

Work life balance here is reasonable – we work hard while we work but we think time off is important too.

Requirements:

We suspect the likely profile for a good candidate for this role is a recent (last 3 years) graduate in arts, engineering, business or sciences with strong academic and professional achievements. The qualities we’re seeking are:

- Intelligence, demonstrated through high academic performance or other accomplishments – preferably both. (Assuming you’re a graduate, we’re looking for a 1.1 or strong 2.1 degree)

- Competence & Responsibility. If we need you to do a routine task, you’ll still take ownership of it and do it well. You’re good at recognizing and correcting your own mistakes.

- Initiative. Anyone can point out problems – you probably learned how to do that in college. We’re looking for someone who can solve them.

- Imagination. You can grasp and appreciate novel and challenging ideas, and even generate and defend them sometimes.

- Communication and presentation skills. You can think and communicate your thoughts sharply, and this comes through in all your communications – including your application. If you have writings online already, include a link in your application.

- You play well with others. We all sit within a few feet of each other.

- A degree or degrees. Not completely essential, as some people do take other paths, but it will be an exceptional candidate who doesn’t satisfy this requirement.

- Enthusiasm. If the prospect of joining us doesn’t excite you somewhat, probably better you don’t apply.

2. Some extras that would be helpful:

- Being a news or current affairs nerd.

- Language competence (especially French, Spanish, Arabic, or German).

- Experience with Excel and Powerpoint.

- Experience using social media for marketing or otherwise grabbing attention.

How do I apply?

Please send a one-page resume and one-page cover letter to jobs@newswhip.com. The job application period runs August 16 to September 5, 2012. NewsWhip is an equal opportunities employer.

If you’re shortlisted, you’ll hear from us.

Thanks very much for reading – if this job isn’t for you, we’d be grateful if you’d pass it on to someone you know who fits the bill.

NewsWhip will be advertising other positions – likely technical and sales roles – in the coming months.

- Paul