Citizen journalism site www.allvoices.com has introduced live event and location-specific Twitter data into its reports, the site announced in a press release yesterday.

The site will now display the latest tweets relating to news stories by location (city, country and region). Around reports from its users, it will include Twitter updates relating to that particular event or news item.

For ‘mainstream’ news reported on the site, Allvoices will now include aggregated tweets relating to those reports to show the conversation around the news.

The addition of the Twitter data will help the site vet stories for authenticity, Allvoices explained. It will be used to provide additional context and rank reports in Allvoices’ ‘Breaking’ and ‘Popular’ news categories. The integration will also add a real-time element to the site’s news stories.

The Twitter data will supplement the existing vetting procedure, which pulls together related content from mainstream news and user-generated sources, like videos, blogs and pictures, to attempt a ‘360-degree view of the news’.

“Twitter alone as a source for news doesn’t have the ability to tell a full story. Allvoices delivers the full story for a report plus a deeper understanding of the conversations going on around that event. What’s great about the system we’ve built is that it can take virtually any data source and apply it to user-generated and mainstream news reports,” said Dr Sanjay Sood, chief technical officer for allvoices.com, in the release.

In May this year the site introduced an incentive scheme for its contributors.