At Turun Sanomat our entire newsdesk uses Little Bird.

Little Bird is a part of our entire newsdesk’s day-to-day. We call it “chirping” when a message from Little Bird lands in our inbox. We’ve become accustomed to receiving the chirps reliably and on time. We use a shared inbox to receive them, where the reporter currently on shift can act on them or forward them appropriately.

Setting up a new monitor is easy and can be done by anyone. At Turun Sanomat, they are primarily created by one person on the basis of the suggestions and wishes of other reporters. This way we are able to keep tabs on the big picture.

The primary use case for Little Bird is ensuring the quality and coverage of our newsdesk. It enables us to systematically cover a wide range of topics. Little Birds lets us keep an eye on different sites and inform us when something of interest pops up. This way we ensure that we don’t miss anything.

Little Bird has achieved victories for us. Let our sports reporter Harri Ahola testify: “Little Bird has helped me discover newsworthy information before it was published anywhere.”

As the largest media of our region, a central part of our duties is to monitor the municipalities in the area. For example, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we emphasized staying on top of all relevant pandemic details in these municipalities. We created a lot of Little Bird monitors of our own, as we could not rely on the municipalities themselves to inform us of quarantines, closures or vaccination locations. Especially monitoring when the vaccinations started was a big thing for us. Little Bird was at the center of producing these news.

At the municipal level, Little Bird helps us in more ways than just handling pandemics. For example, by following the agendas of the city council of the biggest city in our region, Turku, ensures that we are the first to know of any interesting motions.

With the use of a tool like Little Bird, your own imagination is the limit to what kind of monitors you come up with and how you react to their alerts. Little Bird does not create scoops for you, but with inventive use it is possible to discover sources that lead you to publishing news noteworthy on the national scale - even before others were even aware of their existence.