What are News Discovery Tools? Why Use Them?

Last month, I had the pleasure of doing a session on Content Curation called “What Can Nonprofits Learn from the Best Content Curator on the Planet: Robin Good?”  Robin joined me on Skype all the way from Rome.     One of the points he made during our planning call is that in order to curate, you need two sets of tools – news discovery and curation tools.      News discovery tools select and aggregate content based on keyword searches, but give a higher signal to noise ratio than general keywords searches or general news sites.
You need to feed your audience a healthy diet of  high quality content through social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, but if you are finding yourself looking through a lot of unrelated or useless stuff or the content you are sharing is not resonating because you’re being lazy,  news discovery tools can help you be efficient.    They will help you  spend less time looking at bunch of junk in order to find the good stuff as Robin points out.    Also, it lets you step away from the echo chamber and find useful and unique gems that have not been over shared all over the place.   This is what builds thought leadership and attention.
I spent some time going through the tools on Robin’s list to find the ones that were easy to use and gave me good stuff quickly.   But I’ll save that for another blog post.
News discovery tools are important for those who are creating content as well – especially if you’re covering breaking news or using the technique “newsjacking.”  Newsjacking is piggy-backing on timely news or Meerman points out “the second paragraph of a news story.”    It is done by creating original content that takes advantage of timely events that are getting mainstream media attention and providing your organization’s view or take on the topic and sharing it with your audience, including journalists.

But remember, covering breaking news is not about aggregating and pushing out more noise related to the event. Think carefully what your organization can bring to the breaking news and curate or create content accordingly. Robin says it way more eloquently in his four-minute video than I ever could.    If you want an example of an organization that does a brilliant job of covering breaking news, check out grist.
Is your organization using news discovery tools?  Which ones?