BreakFast: Analyzing Celerity of News

In the hypercompetitive news market, news outlets race to break news first. In order to provide better breaking news service and improve the reader experience, news agencies need to understand how to identify bottlenecks and streamline their reporting and delivery processes. With that in mind, we built a system, BreakFast, to measure and compare the speed of delivery of breaking news from various news sources to readers. One of the primary challenges of this comparison is how to identify which breaking news items are about the same emerging event but reported by different news agencies with different headlines and content. To tackle this problem, we extracted keywords automatically from the content, identified important topics, and then developed a classification model. The model identifies the same breaking stories from multiple news sources with an accuracy of approximately 90%. We also proposed new metrics to evaluate the speed of breaking news services and built real-time dashboards to monitor performance over time. We deployed BreakFast into the breaking news service at The Washington Post. This integrated system narrowed in on bottlenecks in its breaking news generation and delivery process, and improved its breaking news service in terms of time by more than 50%.