Social media curator Crowdynews raises €2.5 million

The company was inspired by the US Airways plane forced landing in the Hudson River

Traditional media has struggled with finding an effective way to share, and identify, breaking news on the social sphere. For that reason, outlets like Twitter and Facebook have increasingly become platforms for citizen journalists, who report directly from the scene, simply bypassing the outlets that they once would have to turn to to get their stories out. 

One startup, social media news curation platform Crowdynews, believes that it can help media news outlets bridge the gap by actually gathering content from social media, curating it and selling to traditional media sources.

Now the company has just raised €2.5 million (just under $3 million) in a Series A funding round to turn that vision in a reality. The round was led by INKEF Capital and was joined by co-investor Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) through its New Media Fund.

The company says that it plans to continue its global expansion, and to form more media partnerships, though it did not specify which markets, or potential partners, it is currently looking at.

The Netherlands-based social media news curation platform works by gathering social media posts, photos and videos from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo and other channels into its reader and then using intelligent technologies, such as natural language processing, to achieve over "90% relevancy rates in more than 25 languages.

The company found its initial inspiration following the highly social-mediatised US Airways emergency landing in the Hudson River on January 2009. That event left traditional media out in the cold, while citizen journalists' flames burnt high.

“Most of the breaking news was coming from social media posts. Crowdynews found a way to integrate social media into the news cycle, and media companies have loved the reader engagement plus the revenue sharing model that gives them new digital income," Crowdynews co-founder Edwin Kuipers said in an official statement.  "It’s been a dream come true.”"

Existing Crowdynews clients include Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, AccuWeather, to name a few.

Other players in this crowded field include Storify.com which helps long-form content curation, which also comes with a Storify WordPress plugin. Then there's  Paper.li which enables people to publish newspapers based on topics they select and inform their readers to fresh news, daily, even hourly. Finally,  it is worth mentioning Bundlr.com, which as its name implies allows its user to create bundles of breaking news with any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets, quotes and links.