Social media is at the heart of PA’s 2015 election coverage
Tuesday 7th April, 2015: Press Association (PA), the UK’s leading multimedia news agency and digital content provider, is partnering with leading technology companies as part of its most ambitious ever plans to cover the General Election for customers across digital, broadcast and print.
PA is dedicated to providing comprehensive coverage of the election with a live election wire offering 24/7 updates, rapid reaction graphics, a photo library of all 5,000 plus parliamentary candidates standing around the country, a 60 second wrap up video every day of the campaign as well as an election data feed.
PA’s social media monitoring team will keep across Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram photos of thousands of candidates and influencers – curating and verifying the essential content to be published across its services.
To provide this unrivalled coverage, PA has partnered with a number of leading technology companies including: Adoreboard, SAM, Newzulu and Facebook.
Technology start- up company, Adoreboard, based at Queen’s University Belfast, is helping PA to understand how the campaign is impacting social media, and how social media is impacting the campaign. Via the platform, PA will be analysing thousands of Twitter accounts, and monitoring live reaction to key election moments so the Agency can visualise those reactions into graphics.
SAM will power social media search and curation workflows to ensure PA cuts through the noise, pin-pointing and capturing relevant and meaningful content – including geo-located content around specific events and customized social media embeds.
Thirdly, crowd-sourced media platform Newzulu, will offer live video streaming as well as user generated photo and post-live video content through its worldwide 150k member strong freelance and citizen journalist community, sharing and breaking stories 24/7 with PA via the Newzulu mobile app. Newzulu enables anyone in the world with a smart phone and a story, to share news, get published and get paid. You can share your live streams, post-live video and photos via Newzulu’s General Elections page as well as the Newzulu app.
The election will also mark PA’s first collaboration with Facebook. On Facebook’s behalf, PA will curate and post the most interesting and shareable content on its UK Politics community page.
In addition, PA will utilise its new digital service, SNAP.PA to provide an alternative view of the election through engaging content such as quizzes, lists and social content.
Pete Clifton, PA’s Editor-in-Chief said: “The 2015 General Election will play out on social media in a way not seen before. This event provides PA with a fantastic opportunity to showcase multi-platform content by combining our media expertise and reporting with quality technology partnerships, to provide our customers with the ultimate election coverage package.”
James Neufield, founder of SAM, said: “We believe very strongly that the real-time world of social and user generated content is in need of good journalism. PA understands this well and is providing critical journalistic and editorial value to their customers and even the social networks themselves. Here at SAM, we couldn’t be more pleased to provide the underlying social media curation, search and delivery tools for PA’s journalists.”
Chris Johnston, Chief Executive of Adoreboard, said: “It is an incredibly exciting partnership and Adoreboard will be at the forefront to provide PA with real-time social media analytics to power new content generation and insights.”
Nick Wrenn, Facebook’s Head of Media Partnerships EMEA, said: “PA is an ideal news organisation to run the Facebook UK Politics page because of its commitment to impartiality and balance, and its ability to curate quality content from a wide range of journalists, analysts and public figures. Millions rely on Facebook every day as a source for news, shareable and entertaining content. This page will be a place for people to like, comment and share all the latest updates from the UK election.”
This additional content will be powered alongside PA’s team of political reporters, photographers and video journalists, who will be providing round-the-clock coverage on the campaign trail, including with the leaders on the battle buses. All of PA’s multi-skilled journalists will also be tweeting, creating Vines and Twitter Video and pictures from the field.
For further information on PA’s election coverage please click here.