In an April meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, a tragically buttoned-up affair, the subject of the day was tariff policy. It would have remained an event only of concern to the most deeply wonky of Beltway insiders, had Pat Roberts, the senior senator from Kansas, remembered to silence his phone.
Roberts had just finished asking a question when suddenly, from his coat pocket, came singer Idina Menzel, belting “Let it Go,” the hit song from the animated film sensation Frozen. A sweet, warbling children’s song; a cantankerous senator. All eyes shifted to Roberts. “Just let it go, mister,” he said, as if he knew the internet was watching.
That’s when Alyssa Kurtzman, a 26-year-old producer leading the trending team of NowThis, jumped to action. For NowThis, which publishes its news videos in rapid fire onto social media platforms, a moment like Roberts’ cell phone slip is the kind of easily-digestible moment that leads to lots of social shares. But Kurtzman, like the rest of the media, hadn’t been watching the hearing. She never would have known about the incident without an alert from a digital device on her desk called Dataminr.
Dataminr is a stealthy tool that scours Twitter, looking for tweets that its algorithm considers important and newsworthy. It was Dataminr that alerted Kurtzman to a tweet from an attendee, allowing her to call all hands on deck to search for a video. After finding footage on C-Span’s AV website, they cut a quick story. The resulting video won the day.
Tools like Dataminr are woven so tightly into Kurtzman’s workday, there’s almost never a time when they’re not in use. On the morning I visited NowThis headquarters, Kurtzman’s team had already cut a video based on a Dataminr alert, which directed them to a tweet from a bystander near Penn Station, who’d just watched the nypd shoot a suspect. While one producer cut a video of Bill Clinton’s appearance on David Letterman (“We like to get about six videos per producer, per day,” Kurtzman told me), he scanned Dataminr, tracking responses from a Jeb Bush campaign event. By 11 am, Kurtzman’s staff had received 57 Dataminr alerts, a small chunk of the hundreds they’d sift through by day’s end.
In the fast-paced news cycle of places like NowThis, an emerging generation of “social listening” tools like Dataminr looms large. These tools allow reporters to find a breaking story faster than news outlets have typically been able to, and they’ve proven so effective that even scoop-brokers like CNN, the Associated Press, and the New York Post employ them in their newsrooms. Their benefit comes from allowing editors to spot a story that might be lost in a cluster of their own feeds. “If I have one problem with Twitter it’s just that it’s so quick and so ephemeral. It’s so easy to miss things,” said Kurtzman. “If it’s a breaking story, nine times out of 10 we see it on Dataminr before we see it anywhere else.”
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