Twitter’s new head of news, Vivian Schiller, announced her first project on Wednesday: a partnership with CNN and the New York startup Dataminr. The initiative will help journalists cover breaking news by making sense of the flood of public information on Twitter. Dataminr uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the Twitter firehose of data and highlight the needle in the haystack so CNN reporters can find the most important, relevant, and reliable facts and images from around the world. Dataminr is a five-year-old startup that has raised $48 million from investors like Box Group, Venrock and IVP. Until now it has worked with clients in financial services, helping banks and hedge funds make real-time investment decisions by processing huge amounts of social media content and extracting the high-value information. For example Dataminr told its financial clients that the AP tweet about an explosion at the White House was false five minutes before the AP itself corrected the facts.