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NBC News acquires Stringwire as it looks to harness the power of citizen journalists

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

August 12, 2013 | 2 min read

NBC News has acquired Stringwire - an early stage web service developed by Phil Groman that streams videos taken on phones to news control rooms - as it looks to harness the content generated by ‘citizen journalists’.

With the acquisition, rather than trawling through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites for video clips of breaking news events, NBC News will eventually have live video streamed straight to its control rooms from the mobile devices of witnesses at the scene.

The service taps into the conversations happening on Twitter during an event, and targets eyewitnesses with a Twitter post that asks them to click a link and point their camera at what they are seeing. Without any special app, the service starts streaming live videos to NBC, which are vetted before being aired.

This, NBC states, is the next generation of user-generated content.

“You could get 30 people all feeding video, holding up their smartphones, and then we could look at that. We’ll be able to publish and broadcast some of them,” Vivian Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News, told the New York Times.

Recent events, like the Boston Marathon bombings, the July 6 crash-landing of an Asiana jet in San Francisco and the killing of Lee Rigby in London have highlighted the increasing reliance on ‘citizen journalists’ by media organisations as news breaks on Twitter and Facebook before their crews can arrive on scene.

Earlier this year The Guardian, in partnership with EE, launched Guardian Witness, an app which allows the public to submit news content from wherever they are.

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