BNO News beats New York 911 call

While it may look simple from the outside, behind those lines on our Twitter news service, there is a major newsgathering operation ongoing 24/7.

Of course, the newsgathering operation which we are currently setting up is mainly intended for our future online breaking news service at www.bnonews.com. However, it already gives us the opportunity to report breaking news on our Twitter service before anyone else can. Our newsgathering operations include monitoring literally thousands of local, national and international news outlets, contacting (emergency) officials, witnesses and monitoring official statements (press releases etc.) from all sorts of agencies (you sometimes see some of the press releases on a bnonews.com link which we post on Twitter).

Today, however, we had another great example to show the speed of our newsgathering, not only on important stories but also on local stories when emergency responders are still en-route to the accident.

Earlier today, we posted several updates on BreakingNewsOn regarding a bus crash in the Bronx, New York. It happened at the intersection of Conner Street and the New England Thruway.

As we received word from one of our sources, which said there had been a major bus crash involving two passenger busses carrying a total of around 100 people, we immediately went looking for official confirmation. Note that we only post breaking news updates from sources we consider reliable.

Our first call went to the nearest fire station, which was located near the site of the crash. We spoke with the person in charge at the fire station who told us they were not aware of any bus accident at that location, or at any other location for that matter. As the phone conversation continued and was about to end, sirens were heard in the background and the person at the other end of the line said they just received a call and were now going to respond to the double bus crash.

And although the initial reports indicated a major incident with many injuries, it turned out to be (much) less important. When we last checked, there were only 10 people with minor injuries. A colleague at a national news outlet informed us their sources said there were 9 injuries.

BNO News was working on this story even before emergency services were dispatched to the accident.

We, at BNO News, put a lot of work, time and money in both our forthcoming breaking news service as well as our Twitter news service (www.twitter.com/BreakingNewsOn) and we hope you will support us by contributing to us at www.bnonews.com (and click on the donation banner).

Also, looking back at election day, nearly 700 people subscribed to BreakingNewsOn and vote08 (www.twitter.com/vote08) to follow our in-depth coverage of the historic events that took place. And to give some more insight, our servers processed some 9,000 emails on election day, more than 4,000 visitors who followed our live election blog at bnonews.com and we were the first news source to provide Barack Obama’s victory speech (before he read it) and provided the first comments from US President Bush. And as our more people are turning to BreakingNewsOn, we are now approaching a total of 9,000 followers on Twitter, while we reached our 8,000th follower only two weeks ago.

Again, we hope you enjoy our services and hope you will contribute to help us continue our efforts, because we really need your help!

Thank you, and thank you for following us.