START-UP NATION/NewsWhip:Irish start-up NewsWhip tracks the world's news stories, showing which ones are spreading the fastest by social media, writes JOANNE HUNT

BAD NEWS travels fast or so the idiom goes, but if you want to know just how fast, Irish start-up NewsWhip can tell you exactly.

Founded by Dublin-based Paul Quigley and Andrew Mullaney, a “news junkie” and “an engineering junkie” respectively, NewsWhip tracks the world’s news stories, showing which ones are spreading the fastest by social media.

In the hour we speak, NewsWhip’s leader board of the world’s most social stories is topped by the tale of a Texas honours student, jailed for missing school. Before we finish, it will be toppled by another yarn.

Of course, it’s not just bad news they monitor. “We’re monitoring thousands of different news sites every day,” explains Quigley. “As they are published, we categorise them by topic and origin. Then we start pinging Facebook and Twitter to see how fast the story is spreading, how much social traction it’s getting right now.”

Providing a window into the news stories most igniting Facebook and Twitter at any time, NewsWhip’s pitch to publishers is to put them on the pulse of what readers most want to read. It seems to be working, with both the Huffington Post and MSNBC currently trialing the product.

Meeting on a digital media enterprise programme at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire where Quigley, a former lawyer, and Mullaney a former Accenture consultant, were furthering separate projects, the pair decided to combine forces on NewsWhip.

“There is so much stuff produced on the internet every day, all competing for your attention, it was like, how can you find out what the best stuff is?” explains Quigley.

“I felt we could start using the Facebook and Twitter API to search for social signals . . . there is so much cool stuff out there, it was a matter of introducing people to it. This gives people new and unusual sources for news.”

Bagging a spot on the competitive National Digital Research Centre LaunchPad programme last year, Quigley says while there the pair got guidance from “quality people, annoying you, asking you the right kind of fundamental questions”.

Grateful for the annoyance, he says it helped NewsWhip think about customer acquisition and monetisation in a more systematic way.

On Newswhip.com, news junkies can see the fastest spreading news stories in categories such as technology, science, sports and entertainment. Tracking 5,000 English-language news sources, or 60,000 news stories each day, the site gives a snapshot of the most popular.

But does NewsWhip do anything to maintain the quality of stories on its site – aren’t the most socially shared stories often about cats stuck in tumble dryers?

“Sometimes the stories on top are ridiculous but a lot of the time they are not,” says Quigley. “People don’t want to be associated with dross. They don’t want to put certain stories on their Facebook wall because no one wants to look like they are reading them – so we don’t get TMZ stuff or gossip sites trending because, though people may read that as a guilty pleasure, they don’t share it. We only measure what they are sharing.”

And rather than cannibalising the content created by paid journalists, NewsWhip always links out to the site of the story’s creator. “The internet has its own morality. If a story is doing well, we want to send people to that story and send traffic to that site.”

The company’s Spike product has been developed with newsrooms in mind, says Quigley.

“If we can tell a publisher like MSNBC or the Huffington Post which of their stories is the most social, they can then push that story into a stream perhaps for mobile apps or into widgets that suggest news stories for their readers.”

He says NewsWhip is also talking to wire services such as Reuters and Associated Press about giving them intelligence on their most social stories.

With the aim to have its patent-pending technology used by publishers across the web, Quigley says one of the company’s differentiators is speed. While many news sites already have a league table of the most read or shared stories in the past 24 hours, NewsWhip’s data is in real time.

“We think it’s a more effective way to get people to engage with and read more stories on a news site,” he says. “You are trusting the readers and the real-time social data on what they are doing as a way of curating your own content.”

With a UK and a US investor and some investment from NDRC on board, he says the company has enough money to continue to refine the product and hire a least one more engineer.

Housed at Dogpatch Labs, the incubator for early-stage companies run by US venture capital fund Polaris, the future for NewsWhip looks bright.