Journalists and writers are always looking for quicker and more efficient ways to get the latest news. We are increasingly depending more on using social media as a way to get current information from around the world. Among some of the new tools available is a free website called Storify.com. This site lets you gather tweets, TwitPics, Flickr photos, Facebook updates, YouTube videos, and Instagram photos in one group. You can then add commentary and publish it on the Web as a story. Using the Storify editor journalists and the general public can search social media networks to find related posts about their topic of interest.
Burt Herman, co-Founder of Storify started the site when he was looking a lot at innovation and how it could be applied to journalism website copywriting services with the web and social media. “Everyone on the ground is potentially a reporter,” he says. The site officially launched in April 2011. Herman says that instead of searching all these different places and copying and pasting, with this site it’s basically just drag and drop, then users can put the their story together on the site and embed it anywhere else.
Herman says as far as attribution goes, whoever puts the story together gets the credit. “You can have your story here, publish it and someone else can publish it on their site, but you will always have the attribution and you can see all the places your story has been embedded,” he adds.
Herman gives an example of a student journalist who put together a story on Occupy Wall Street and the Washington Post embedded it on their site.
According to Herman, in the near future, Storify will be made more user friendly so that the general public can use it to create stories about various topics and publish it.
I got some feedback from Jaclyn Schiff, a journalist / media consultant in the Washington, DC area who’s used Storify. Schiff says Storify is a clean and visually appealing way to take pieces of web content and weave them together to tell a story. She’s used it to create lists (here is a recent example from Brazen Life) and summarize live-tweeted events (here is an example that she used as part of a UN Dispatch post).
“The web is so real-time these days. News is being broken and reported in tweets, status updates etc. I think Storify is a great tool for presenting highlights or summarizing a story that has already played out online using the “original source material.”
Schiff adds that although Storify can be a little buggy at times, it’s usually fast and easy to use and integrates seamlessly with most content management systems.
