How NPR tweets topical archive material

Via @richard_grant comes this interesting piece about NPR using automated tweets to link readers to archived stories about names and events currently in the news.

Called NPR Backstory, the app detects trending topics, searches the NPR archive for related material and tweets the results – a neat way of getting fresh traffic out of archived material.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Joshua Benton‘s piece on the Nieman Journalism Lab site. He starts by talking about an NPR Backstory tweet he saw about Kentucky Derby winning jockey Calvin Borel.

It was from an automated Twitter account called NPRbackstory, a project by a man named Keith Hopper. Keith is a project manager at Public Interactive, a division of NPR, and NPRbackstory is an intriguing experiment in getting value out of one of the most overlooked assets any established news organization has: its archives.

The link in the Borel tweet is to a brief piece NPR’s Noah Adams did on the jockey two years ago, after he’d won his first Kentucky Derby. The genius of NPR Backstory is that it took no human intervention to create that tweet: the code behind it automatically detected that lots of people were suddenly searching for information about Calvin Borel, searched NPR’s archives for any Borel-related stories, found one, and posted a link to Twitter.

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NPRbackstory uses Google’s Hot Trends data to determine what topics people have suddenly started searching for in large numbers. It uses NPR’s API to search the archives, then uses Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed that then gets cycled into the NPRbackstory Twitter account.

The results, Keith will be the first to tell you, aren’t perfect. He estimated at the time we talked that about 50 percent of the links NPRbackstory finds aren’t really to archival stories — they’re to fresh news stories.

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Another 15 percent of the results, he said, are complete misses. Those are usually caused by search terms that have multiple meanings… (And once in a while there’s something way out of left field, like this attempt to tie “plankton” to a memoir by the advice columnist Ask Amy. The word “plankton” appears once in the story, in the seventh paragraph. “It’s a fun project — it’s not a masterpiece,” Keith told me.)

But the rest of the time, it works really well — plucking a gem from the NPR archives that adds context and depth to some subject in the news.

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Even though its results can be hit-or-miss, I think the idea behind NPRbackstory is brilliant. News archives are underused assets. For the news organizations that have invested in putting years (or over a century) of past work online, it’s worth investing time to figure out strategies to bring attention to it all.

And it’s also a smart use of Twitter. NPRbackstory gives me a few links a day to interesting stuff I wouldn’t otherwise find — embedded among the tweets from all my friends and others I follow.

There’s much more in Joshua Benton’s piece that’s worth reading, including more detail about the app, the impetus for it and its potential.