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Software Integration

Founded by former AP reporter Burt Herman and software engineer Xavier Damman, Storify makes it easy for reporters to cut and paste reactions to the news from social media platformas into their own posts or articles. Major media outlets including the Guardian, CNN and the Washington Post use Storify. Reporters can add this as a sidebar or embedded into their own posts, adding facts and context to the piece.

It’s not difficult to search social media platforms for status updates, photographs and videos, but Storify makes it easier to drag and drop the information into a story and add text as needed. Storify also generates an embeddable code, so you can actually post the story directly from social media to your content management system, such as WordPress.

Another benefit of Storify is that it allows you to make legal use of embedded photos and text, since they are displayed within the context of the social network and therefore covered under so-called fair use laws.

But the ways in which content creators are actually using Storify are much more diverse and here are a few you can use, too.
 
Storify

Storify Uses

 

Taking notes during a workshop

One way to use Storify is to embed live tweets, articles and reactions of participants during a workshop or a conference. I did this myself during Monica Guzman’s journalism workshop at a Society of Professional Journalists event in Minneapolis in April 2013.

 

Gathering reactions to breaking news

Many newspapers today collect real-time reactions from people in their area, and include that alongside news pieces. Some also accept reader photographs and embed them in Storify, like the New York Daily News, which recently posted reader photographs of an ice storm. And in 2013, NBC used Storify to publish images of clashes in Cairo published on social media.

 

Reader comments on articles

After the Atlantic Journal published a piece on whether journalists should learn to code, a fierce Twitter debate ensued. This was captured in Storify by journalist Mindy McAdams.

 

Twitter versus Storify

You may wonder about the differences between Twitter custom timelines and Storify. Twitter custom timelines allow you to compile and display tweets in the order they were added in a timeline. Storify is a bit more comprehensive. Added benefits include the ability to add text between tweets, as well as including other social media sources. It also allows you to rearrange the order of the status updates you’d like to include.

 

Tips on how to use Storify

First, create an account at Storify. You can log in with Facebook or Twitter. Next, select your profile and click ‘create a story’ in the top of your screen.

After creating a headline, you can select icons on the right side of the screen for the social media networks you’d like to include in any searches. Options include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and Google. Add your username for each of the networks you want to use, and they’ll be included in your search queries.

After searching for a specific name, event, topic or person, you can drag content from that panel into your story, adding commentary and explanation as needed.

Once you’re finished, you can publish the story on Storify or embed it on your blog.