You know how CNN was in a race with Ashton Kutcher about a month ago to see who would be the first to acquire one million followers on Twitter? What you might not realize is that, at the time, CNN didn't actually own the Twitter feed in question. @CNNbrk was created back in 2007 by a young Londoner who wanted to solve a simple problem: How to get breaking news updates on his phone.

In mid-April, as the number of followers on the feed got too big for one guy to manage, James Cox handed control over to CNN (in what he called "a mutually beneficial agreement"). BayNewser caught up with Cox to hear the backstory on how @CNNbrk came about. Cox, a 25-year-old freelance technologist, is finishing up a three-month stint in San Francisco as part of a two-year experiment living in different parts of the world. Next stop: Buenos Aires.

How did you come to create @CNNbrk?
The events of 9/11 and 7/7 [the London bombings on July 7, 2005] and the change of tone that we were all experiencing in the world made me feel I wanted to have a much more connected sense to what was going on. When important events happened, I wanted to feel I knew about them right away. Not that I could do anything about them, but it was important to be connected. I was looking for a way to enable that.

Full interview, after the jump.

In 2001, 2005, when we were figuring out blogs and RSS, the BBC were blazing a path there for a while, but their feeds weren't quite what I was looking for. They were noisy. I wanted just the main news, and getting it on the phone was a real challenge. It was back before anything like Twitter was around, so it was all very manual. I ended up trying, and failing, two or three times.

Then a friend introduced me to Twitter. I realized it had incredible potential to connect feeds to users. So I ended up repurposing the feed and taking the CNN email alerts, which at the time were the most, and still are, editorially driven, and putting them into a form I could consume as I traveled. CNN's feed also had the right level of noise level as well, which is one reason why it’s become popular.

When did the feed go live?
I pushed it out there January 1, 2007. It was a New Year's Day hacking. It was me saying, right, I can solve this right now. I have all the tools I need. It was a very simple email-passing script that pushed it out there.

I announced it to my friends—I made a tweet about it. I got a few followers, and it grew organically. As Twitter grew, it grew.
For most of the last two years, when you searched Google for "CNN breaking news," it was the third or fourth hit. So that really helped a lot. I would hazard a guess that @CNNbrk ended up driving through adoption [of Twitter] a lot in the early days. I'd watch the big spikes in growth [for Twitter], and they'd almost always be mirrored by signups to @CNNbrk. In other words, people were searching Google for "CNN breaking news," and they'd see @CNNbrk in Google and would sign up.

How fast did it grow?
We got to 100,000 users all by ourselves. That was about two or three months ago—just before Twitter started "suggested users." When that feature came out, to suggest users to follow when you open an account, CNNbrk was one of the users, and growth went up to a million, which is what it is now. It was at 960,000 when the handover happened.

When did CNN first contact you about the feed?
Within two or three months of existing, I got an email from CNN staff asking to talk about what it was. We agreed on a set of mutual goals. I got some content assets—some graphics and colors to use. We both felt this was the right way to do it. It was still too early for CNN to spend a decent about of time on Twitter by themselves. And I built it, it worked, so we left it growing.

Once it got to the point where both felt—I felt certainly—it was a little too big to run by itself, the time was right to come over and spend some time talking to CNN about the social web and to hand over the account.

Were you sad to let it go?
A little. It was a big part of my day to keep an eye on things. It didn't need a lot of maintenance, but it was fun to watch the responses. But if I was doing that today with a million plus followers, I would be spending literally the entire day following up on responses. So, yeah, it was fun, it was interesting. It was a little hack, scratching an itch, and it grew to become something interesting.

You mentioned CNN had the right "noise level." What's that?
A lot of news sources are publishing hundreds of stories a day. But only one percent of those is going to be really interesting breaking news. That's how CNN see it.

What advice would you give news organizations about how to use Twitter?
The one core element is that there isn't an easy fix. You can't just push a feed out and hope it works. What we're learning about social media and social outreach and social interaction with the news is that the better organizations are those who already have staff time assigned to work on it, those who have editors whose job might be to do blogs or those who have editors whose job it is to interact with the social landscape. And we're seeing that those companies or brands who actually select people to follow up—JetBlue, Comcast—they're the ones who [get engagement].

In the last 20, 30 years of software development, we've learned that we're really bad at building systems that can assimilate a lot of information and pull out the top-line content. It's a really hard task. It has as much to do with emotion as it does with objective reasoning. Because of that, we're ways away from building systems that can do that effectively. So my main advice is to hire someone whose job it is to interact with people and to spend twice as much time listening as talking, which is the commonality about humanity, really.

What news organizations do you think are doing a good job of this already?
The New York Times. They haven't gotten there yet. They certainly have a lot of editors online. They have a wide scope of output, but they're still trying to find a way to assimilate that into a broader strategy.

The Guardian is beginning to get there, but they're still a little behind, and it's a little bit more of an individual- than a corporate-led strategy.

Obviously, CNN is doing a great job of outreach. But again, even with companies like CNN who are, either by desire or by dint of people like me, a little ahead of the curve, they still need to find a way to become comfortable with it at all levels of the organization. But that's normal.

And Harper's. The guy whose job it is to look after the Harper's Index spends time producing output for Twitter from the Index that relates to what’s going on today. Which is a really interesting use of that data in a much more timely fashion than in a monthly index.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

If you want to keep up with Cox, you can follow him on his own Twitter feed: @imajes

Photo credit: James Cox