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The Breaking News Network

The Breaking News Network
Feb 24 · 9 min read

The Breaking News Network (“BNN”) was developed in 2009 to support the distribution of hyperlocal news across over 400 cities and communities worldwide, including 320 in the United States. The mission was to curate and aggregate breaking news not only from independent local news and blog sources in each city, but also politicians, civic groups, nonprofits, cultural and arts organizations, and community leaders. The goal was to cover local topical news of social and cultural impact not consistently reported within today’s cash strapped local news ecosystem, one that goes beyond the usual local TV news fodder of crime, crashes, sports, weather and traffic.

To supplement the coverage of local news sources, the BNN set up a localized syndication programwith independent news publishers nationwide to distribute articles specific to a locality in real time through its network feeds. These indie publishers provide an augmented perspective to important local events in places like Charlottesville VA or Ferguson MO that otherwise wouldn’t reach local audiences. This also exposes these indie publishers to For example, when Colorlines publishes an article related to a city, like Philadelphia, the BNN Tucson feed @breakingtusnewstweets the article link and embeds the article into BreakingTucsonNews.com. In addition, the Twitter handle @colorlines is appended at the end of the tweet to trigger publisher notification and social sharing. that generally do not have ways to target audiences in specific cities and geographies. For example, specific articles in real time for local consumption. The program is based on parsing publisher articles by location across ~100 BNN metro city feeds. For example, when Colorlines publishes an article related to a city, like Tucson, the BNN Tucson feed @breakingtusnewstweets the article link and embeds the article into BreakingTucsonNews.com. In addition, the Twitter handle @colorlines is appended at the end of the tweet to trigger publisher notification and social sharing.

The Breaking News Network was initially built as 400 individual news websites with the goal to serve as a comprehensive local news reference database.

From day one, the network has been dedicated to community service and social impact. At its peak, the network curated over 18,000 community voices and local media, across 400 cities worldwide. Including the community as newsmakers (with no pressure to advertise, because there are never any ads!) resulted in local good will that differentiated us from other news networks.

The Breaking News Network

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    The Breaking News Network

    The Breaking News Network

    The Breaking News Network is a global hyperlocal network devoted to social good. Our 400 cities are followed by over 1,200,000 loyal readers. @thebnn

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