De Persgroep Uses Crowdynews Social Media Curation to Vitalize Local News
Crowdynews Helps Media Publisher Deliver Hyper Local News via Social Media Content Feeds across Hundreds of Communities
GRONINGEN, Netherlands – 2 September 2014 – Crowdynews, the social media curation platform for media companies, today announced its products are being used by De Persgroep, the leading news media publisher in Belgium and Netherlands, to re-invent regional and hyper local news. The newspaper and media organisation is offering micro-level local news content with a social media layer to over 300 communities and a population of about 6 million people in Flanders. Crowdynews gathers and filters relevant social media content and posts it in real-time on the news sites, creating user-generated local and regional content alongside traditional news stories.
“As a news organisation, offering content that is relevant and fresh is of paramount importance,“ said Jeroen Verkroost, chief digital officer at De Persgroep. “Over 90% of the readers from our largest newspaper indicated a strong interest in regional and (hyper) local content. Classic regional journalism is one of our strengths, but we were looking for ways to add a real-time customer dimension. Crowdynews has helped us augment our local stories with the voice of the community using social media feeds.”
Because De Persgroep is blending traditional stories with social media posts submitted by local residents, they needed Crowdynews to take the social media feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites and match the look and feel of the De Persgroep websites. Crowdynews was able to accommodate the customisation, making the content between the news stories and social media fairly seamless. Readers have responded positively to the new format. Thousands have contributed their own social media content to the local Het Laatste Nieuws (HLN) regional websites via a hashtag #HLN[yourtown].
Crowdynews gathers social media posts, photos and videos from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo and others to augment traditional reporting with social media and engage readers. The platform uses advanced technologies such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence to achieve over 90% relevancy rates in more than 25 languages. Crowdynews is the only social media curation platform that is both multi-lingual, globally scalable and pulls from a list of premium social media services.