How collaborative research tool x.news monitors sources

A collaborative search engine for journalists aiming to bring all sources into one place is currently being piloted in the newsrooms of a number European and US-based broadcasters.
   
X.news, created by Austrian software company X-Art, pulls together information from sources including newswires, Twitter, and websites, as well as images and videos from both internal and external sources.
   
"What journalists normally have open is a whole bunch of websites, a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, their image libraries, all in different systems," said Joe Trainor, product and sales director at X-Art.
   
On x.news, these search results for stories update in real time, and journalists can share their work with other reporters using the tool.
 
The collaboration feature allows different departments working on similar stories to see which sources others are tracking, and what material has already been gathered by reporters in the newsroom.
   
Trainor said some departments, when publishing or broadcasting on different platforms, are not necessarily aware of what stories the others have already written.
   
"There's a lack of collaboration and there's a lack of knowledge with the information that they have in the business," he said.
   
X.news aims to "surface" this information, as well as find new sources online.
   
Media organisations who use separate Twitter lists to organise the accounts they follow and trust can search these lists through x.news, which creates a single curated list.
   
Users can also add new Twitter accounts or other web sources of interest to each story, or search the whole of Twitter if nothing is particularly helpful in the existing lists.
   
The search engine alerts users of updates to each story, by showing the number of new Twitter messages and web sources it has found.
   
The tool also includes a workspace for journalists to write the story once they've found the information they were looking for, and then export it to their organisation's content management system or publish it straight to social media among other options.
   
X.news had its soft launch at this year's National Association of Broadcasters show, and has been in the pilot stage since September.
   
X-Art has been working with Annova and David Systems to bring x.news to newsrooms using the two companies' tools.
   
The pilot is about "[getting] people to move away from the traditional manual process that they currently use to find information," said Trainor.

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