Anna's Cubby Hole: Ramblings of a Cub Reporter
As a journalism student and intern, I've learned that life as a cub reporter is filled with "lessons" about life, being ignored and journalism. Being stuck in the cubby hole can be frustrating, but who knew clawing my way to the top would also be enjoyable?
Storify and Journalism: An Exploration
Posted by on August 17, 2011
It’s a little embarrassing for a media/journalism junkie to admit, but I just discovered Storify this morning. I’m hoping to use it for future blog posts, but my first story will be an investigation of Storify’s impact on media and journalistic potential.
From what I can tell so far, Storify is an interactive tool for people to easily create stories using tweets, Facebook statuses and links. From their FAQ:
Storify is a way to tell stories using social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.
Storify launched its private beta in September 2010, according to Mashable.com. Media outlets and bloggers were first to utilize Storify, developing real-time stories on the 2010 midterm election and other topics. Unlike following Twitter trending topics, Storify allows story writers to pick and choose the most relevant tweets, videos and pictures about a certain thing. The search bar also allows users to filter out RTs and search for pictures.
Storify became available to the public in April and has since been used to document the #londonriots as well as bad dates.
What’s great about Storify is that users can search tweets, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube–everything, really–all from the same window. Unlike posting a regular WordPress or Tumblr post, bloggers don’t have to keep opening up Google to look for a specific reference.
After writing this post, I’m convinced Storify is an excellent new tool for journalists with a focus on multi-media and social networking sources. I have a feeling that articles will gradually become more like this as people move away from face-to-face and even phone content. As people stop using the phone the best way to get direct quotes will be through Twitter and Facebook. But hopefully in-person interviews won’t completely die.
A lot of journalists are stubborn and unwilling to accept change, but I think as more discover how easy Storify makes organizing content, they’ll become converts.
My only concern is that Storify makes it easy to organize existing content on the web, but there’s no option I can see for uploading your own videos unless they’re already available in a tweet or through Flickr. I’ll do a bit more exploring to see if there’s a better method for sharing photos.
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What a great idea ! On my list to try
Properly said & with glorious timing
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