Teaming With Data-Mining Security Firms to Get a Lead on News

When Ronan Farrow, the young human rights lawyer with a Hollywood lineage, debuts as an MSNBC host on Monday, he will have some prodigious computing power backing him up. MSNBC has struck a partnership with Vocativ, a digital news start-up, to provide the new program — “Ronan Farrow Daily” — with up to three taped video segments a week. …

News organizations are in a mad rush to team with new companies that they hope can give them an edge in finding story leads. In forming alliances, they are also seeking to attract younger viewers who are more likely to get their news from sites like Twitter and Facebook than from the evening news. …

The software at the heart of Vocativ, known as Open Mind, was developed as a tool for corporations to identify threats to their business. Open Mind searches social media, chat rooms, documents and other public interactions on what it calls “the deep web” — areas often overlooked by search engines like Google. CONT.

Leslie Kaufman, New York Times

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