An ‘online newspaper with no writers’ could spell fundamental change in the practice of media relations. Launched in the US, the paper uses an algorithm as opposed to journalists to scour social media sites for relevant news links.

Tewspaper uses publicly available APIs to automatically trawl social media sites for local news covering Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York City.

“Tewspaper is a newspaper built from social media,” said its creator, Jared Lamb. “We currently cover 10 cities across the United States. We try to find the best news by area and topic. While currently in beta, we have plans to expand coverage across many different cities, states, and possibly countries.”

By including messages on the website, publishers can increase their audience. This can lead to more followers on both social media and blogs and websites.

“We began by limiting the news to trusted authorities on Twitter. From there, we are working on an algorithm that can find additional breaking news from anyone on Twitter and other websites as it happens,” Lamb said.