Using tags for breaking news elicitation

The reduction in news cycle time coupled with high Internet penetration have resulted in a phenomenon known as `citizen journalism´ where ordinary people who are non-journalists collect, analyze and disseminate news pieces. This paper leverages tags drawn from iReport, an active citizen journalism Website to elicit breaking news. The goal is to examine the coverage and effectiveness of news elicitation in iReport vis-a¿-vis those reported in the mainstream media. The data collection procedure involved manually culling major news events reported in mainstream news sources between April 8 and June 6 2008. In parallel, tags from iReport postings were extracted during the same study period. Tags were analyzed using correlational analysis and relative frequencies. Results show that out of the 10 major news events reported in mainstream sources, five could be elicited from tags in iReport. Implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.