Tracking the work of a billion editors
We live in a world of too much information. With thousands of stories published each day, how can you find the best quality and the most compelling? We think the answer lies with people. We humans have an instinct for good stories, and we know the news stories worth sharing with our friends. So we’ve built a technology that tracks all the news shared on Facebook and Twitter each day, to find the fastest spreading, most shared, highest quality stuff, and reveal it to the world.
How it works
NewsWhip's technology tracks all the news published by about 5,000 English-language sources –about 60,000 news stories each day. It gathers social data for each story – how many shares, likes, tweets and comments it has – at repeated intervals, building a live picture of how popular it is, right now. With this information, it calculates a social speed at which each story is travelling. The process is unique, new, and patent pending.
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We publish links to the fastest spreading stories on NewsWhip.com, divided into categories like tech, science, art and gossip. You can see the most shared news this hour in countries like the US, the UK - or our own home, Ireland. People only share engaging news stories – so NewsWhip is always populated with the very best content.
Pro tools
We’ve used our technology to develop some excellent pro tools. First, Spike is our powerful tool for spotting early trending stories from all over the world. Editors and journalists can see how their own stories are spreading, and also check in on other sites, blogs, video and other sources for new trends and stories. Right now, Spike is giving useful insights to many digitally focused newsrooms including the BBC, NBCnews.com, The Huffington Post, Mashable Buzzfeed, and RTÉ. If you’d like to trial it, please get in touch.
We've also built an engagement-enhancing product called the Social Amplifier, which displays a news company’s most trending stories in real time. It kicks the pants off existing widgets on news sites, which tend to be populated with older stories, like the ones that have been biggest over the last 24 hours. Instead, it gives readers and journalists a live view of what the site’s users are sharing, making sites more engaging and sticky.
NewsWhip founders Andrew Mullaney and Paul Quigley
About the Company
NewsWhip was founded by Paul Quigley and Andrew Mullaney, and is based in Dublin, Ireland and New York. The founders planned and built the technology behind NewsWhip in 2011 and won a place on the NDRC Launchpad accelerator. The first version of NewsWhip went live in September 2011, earning coverage from the BBC, The Next Web, Mashable, The Inquisitr, Silicon Republic, Killer Startups, and others.
In 2012, the company attracted excellent investors including the NDRC, entrepreneur Shane Naughton and UK-based Meridian Growth Capital. Working closely with some of the world's major news companies and PR firms, the team developed NewsWhip Spike, a professional tool for monitoring the spread of news through the social web.
NewsWhip's team are proud residents of DogPatch Labs, Europe, in the buzzing neighborhood of Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock. The team also works out of DogPatch Labs New York, near Union Square, New York City. The NewsWhip team is dedicated to tracking and understanding social distribution, and building products that reflect the world's conversation. Awesome mobile apps for iPhone and Android are coming at the end of 2012, and many new languages will be added to the NewsWhip platform in 2013.
Team
Paul is NewsWhip’s CEO. A lawyer by trade, he spent several years litigating, arbitrating and advising at some of New York’s major commercial law firms. From 2009, he was increasingly drawn to the online news revolution, and started exploring ways to curate and find good news stories. He left New York to start NewsWhip in 2010. Paul’s return to news publishing may have been inevitable – he founded his first newspaper, the Castletroy Times – at 15. He’s a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and New York University, with degrees in law and international law.
Andrew is NewsWhip’s CTO. A computer engineer, he handles all of NewsWhip’s build and technical architecture. Before NewsWhip, Andrew founded EasyDeals, a deals platform, and worked as a consultant with Accenture. He developed and scaled NewsWhip’s technology in a Herculean multi-month solo run, earning the nickname “the fifth floor.” He’s a graduate of University College Dublin, with degrees in computer engineering and management science.
Since NewsWhip went live, we’ve built excellent relationships with journalists and editors whose feedback has helped us focus on how to turn our technology into a critical newsroom and publishing tool. We’re eager to meet and speak to others in the online news space – please drop us a line to say hello.
If you’re interested in trending news and the future of social news, here’s our Facebook page and Twitter account, where we post a lot on trending stories. And check out The Whip, our blog on some of the fascinating data we’re building, our new products, and startup lessons learned.
- Paul & Andrew
