The site has two main goals: 1. to help people enhance their worldview or perspective of global events; 2. to increase dialogue about international news and make the world smaller through conversation and interaction, both on this site and on Twitter.

The philosophy behind the site is “hyperlocal gone global.” There is an emphasis on what is happening in a specific place at a specific time and looks at how people are reacting to that event(s) in the area.

Barbara Iverson recently wrote about the site–which launched at the beginning of this year–for Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits:

[Breaking Tweets] is associated with the account Twitter.com/breakingtweets, but it takes Twitter messages to a new level. The site has just added Breaking Tweets Entertainment and Breaking Tweets Sports, and will soon add Breaking Tweets Chicago…

Breaking Tweets has human editors who manually select messages for inclusion in their stories. Furthermore, the editors treat the Tweets like quotes, weaving the 140 character missives into a comprehensive story on a news topic.From a “virtual newsroom,” the team keeps connected via e-mail and online.

Last month, BeatBlogging.org’s Lily Q interviewed BreakingTweets.com founder Craig Kanalley, a journalism grad student at DePaul University (the staff listed on the Breaking Tweet’s site mostly consists of journalism students).

Kanalley tells Lily that he first got the idea for the site after he “saw the amount of people twittering about Election Day and how Twitter can serve as a place for breaking news, very personal feelings and eyewitness accounts.”

A few more snippets from Kanalley:

Tweets are great because they are short, quick and, in many ways, they are just like quotes that journalists would often use anyway. They are instantaneous and, as a result, they work well with news in general, also across a wide geographic scope.

Breaking Tweets changes the practice because it focuses on editing the Web. There is so much clutter out there but it takes it all and seeks to make sense of it. I think a well done Breaking Tweets story can be just as valuable as a longer form traditional news story on the same subject. It gives a different glimpse into the story.

See the full interview here.

Don’t let the name fool you though, Breaking Tweets is not intended to “break the news.” In a blog post, Kanalley writes, “The point of the site I put together is to chronicle the biggest news around the world each day and put a Twitter spin on it by personalizing the news through tweets.”

But the site actually did scoop the BBC and CNN last week.  Read more about that here.

Breaking Tweets logo/BreakingTweets.com

As millennials come of age, they’re infiltrating the work force in all areas and all industries. Many, like me, are becoming journalists. And some, like me, are continually re-evaluating this career decision. While I think you can find recovering journalists in almost every generation (I’ve chatted with way too many people who seem to have concluded that being a journalist was more appealing on paper than in practice), there are some unique reasons why the news room can be a toxic place for millennials. At the same time, the digitalization of news is providing opportunities that mesh really well with the Gen Y mentality.

Keen observers of Gen Y know that this generation craves work-life balance. For us, sacrificing a personal life to climb the ranks at work isn’t a reasonable trade-off. We want jobs that can accommodate life, not a life that has to accommodate the job – an aspiration that is often at odds with the status quo in many work places. It is an especially lofty goal when it comes to journalism, a career that often requires late hours and weekend work to meet deadlines.

Al Jazeera English newsroom. Photo: jdebner/Flickr

Predictably, millennials in journalism aren’t happy about those long hours. According to a 2005 Poynter survey, journalists between 20 and 34 years old were most likely to say they had considered leaving journalism because of work-life balance issues. And newsroom vets generally aren’t getting it. Danna Walker, an adjunct journalism professor at American University who also works as an editor and producer at CBS, says that “the older generation didn’t know what to think” when millennials first showed up in newsrooms. “The assumption is that millennials aren’t as willing to pay their dues,” she says. In fact, the whole “pay your dues” mentality is “worn out,” according to Bea Fields, author of “Millennial Leaders.” Control tactics do nothing to attract and retain Gen Y employees, as Fields explains over at Y Blog.

Newsrooms also rarely meet Gen Y’s mentorship and training expectations. A young journalist recently submitted a question to “Ask the Recruiter” columnist Joe Grimm, a well-know recruitment and development editor for the Detroit Free Press. The recent graduate wrote that he got “minimal feedback” from the editors at his paper, leaving him with “no idea” whether he was doing a good job or a bad job. “If misery loves company, you have plenty of both,” Grimm writes in response, citing a survey that found that lack of training is the number one complaint that journalists have about the profession.

But millennials aren’t totally doomed to an otherwise unhappy or non-existent future in journalism. The Internet and multimedia news can add a “wonderful dynamic” to newsrooms, says Jill Geisler, a journalism leadership and management specialist at Poynter. Young journalists with technical skills are in big demand to staff news Web sites. As a result, many new hires are commanding respect from day one because they’re often the only person in the newsroom with the multimedia know-how to perform certain tasks. “As editors realize they need new approaches and people with new media skills, younger folks are becoming more valued,” Walker writes in an e-mail. A Gen Y friend who works for NBC in Washington, D.C. tells me that she and some of her other colleagues are sought after by their older newsroom counterparts who are hoping that the millennials can teach them a thing or two about the computer programs they learned in journalism school. In many situations, multimedia is not only allowing Gen Yers to get a foot in the door, but it’s immediately positioning them in roles where they are taken seriously from the start.

In addition, the expansion of online news is also catering to Gen Y’s job-hopping tendencies. New positions are popping up in many companies that are launching or expanding Web sites to complement print work. Job-hopping within the industry is common, observes Meg Martin, a multimedia producer for the Roanoke Times. “There’s a lot of crossover and a lot of news organizations are encouraging people to explore different positions,” Martin says.

The news industry is facing a moment of significant challenges and prospects in terms of recruitment of Gen Y journalists. Will digital news be journalism’s proverbial “knight in shining armor” when it comes to recruiting millennials and then retaining them for longer than five minutes? Could it set journalism apart from other industries in the quest to adapt to Gen Y? The answer will certainly depend on how individual newsrooms resolve work-life balance concerns, training needs and other issues that matter to millennials. But for me and the thousands of other millennials with notoriously high student loan payments, the bottom line might just end up getting the largest say.