Welcome to Screener

A tool that helps you tell company stories faster, easier and better. How? By freeing up valuable time and making some aspects of your work easier: company research and fact-checking, news monitoring and visual content creation.

Screener in a nutshell

Screener is a new journalism tool for business journalists. They can find, fact-check and monitor information across international company and news databases. For news content it is possible to set alerts and to detect events associated with a company name. By using ready-made templates, journalists can easily produce data-based visuals in a given corporate design. For example, Screener offers lay-outed company information boxes that provide information about the companies mentioned in a story. For more research-intensive projects, there is a curated list of data sources and tools that can be directly accessed from Screener. The tool has been designed to save journalists’ time and to makes complex workflows feasible. It now becomes easier to conduct fact-checks in large registration databases, to be up-to-date with current company news and to quickly publish visual content item, for both online and social media publishing.

How Screener helps with company research and monitoring

  • Easily find and fact-check specific company information stored in international company registration databases
  • Find information related to a company in news feeds from international publishers and filter by source
  • Detect news events around a specific company name
  • Store relevant news articles for your project in a named research collection
  • Set alerts to automatically get news articles for one or more companies directly into your inbox
  • Get inspired while you work with Screener – by seeing unexpected facts, news sources and thematic connections
  • Quickly select and connect to further useful data sources and tools that might be helpful for your project – curated by the Screener team

How Screener helps with visual content creation

  • Save company data sets from your research for the creation of small visual content items to use as online illustrations or in social media
  • Using auto-completed data, easily create and edit items such as company information boxes, lists or data visualisations. (This version offers Information Boxes)
  • Use a ready-made visual template that fits the corporate design you or your company require. (This version offers one DW template)
  • Receive a jpg file or iFrame that can be immediately used in any publishing context. (This version produces a jpg file)

Why support tools like Screener?

The way journalists work is changing. Support tools that work with data sources, templates and automation begin to play an important role in journalism workflows and also the digital transformation of media companies. These tools can help to free up valuable time and to improve accuracy, quality and diversity of storytelling. More and more journalists are expected to use open data sources and to create their own visuals for illustrating news articles.

Screener and business journalism

Business journalism involves specific facts and accurate, up-to-date company related information. Much of this is hidden in multiple, complex data sources. This makes company related research, fact checking or monitoring time consuming, if not impossible.

Factual company stories may benefit from visual content extensions, for example company information boxes that summarise key facts about the companies mentioned in the article. These visuals can also be used for article promotion or direct social media publishing. Although these are very small items, it can be a lengthy process to produce them in the necessary corporate design of a media company.

Who is behind Screener?

This tool is a technical prototype for alpha testing purposes, developed by DW Innovation as part of the EU co-funded research and innovation project euBusinessGraph.

About this version of Screener and connected databases

This technical prototype has not been optimised for usability and user experience. It demonstrates the service concept, core functions and integrated external APIs that provide access to news articles from Deutsche Welle, Event Registry and company registration data from OpenCorporates. It will be extended with more functions in line with the integration of a new connected company database (the BusinessGraph). This is currently being developed in the euBusinessGraph project by other specialist partners.

Access and contact

This tool is under development and not for public distribution. At this point, access is by invitation only. If you have more questions or you wish to become a test user, please get in contact with: kay.macquarrie@dw.com