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March 24 2012

Storify and curation

Storify is a great tool for journalists to curate from the Web.

I’ve seen folks use it for breaking news, on a specific topic and even just to save a conversation. It works well for preserving/organizing twitter conversations on a topic. But you can also draw from all sorts of other social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Flickr, Instagram and just basic Web links, including other news sources.

Kelly Fincham, an assistant journalism professor at Hofstra University, has a great tutorial on using Storify for journalism educators and students. And she touches on one of the key issues of any sort of social media curation today - verification. As with any journalistic effort, you’ll want to make sure what you’re placing in your storify is valid, truthful information. That means checking the sources - do they have a webpage, can you verify their employment with an organization, is there another way to determine that they are who they say they are? Of course, even reputable sources can be wrong (remember initial Twitter reports reports that Gaby Giffords had died?).

Storify posts can be easily embedded on your website or Wordpress blog.

For our audience, curating via Storify can make them feel like part of the story, it gives them a sense of what other people are saying about a story and it blends a variety of media, including photos, audio and video.

Here are a few examples:

  • The Buffzone sports crew at the Daily Camera used Storify when CU won the Pac 12 hoops championship (scroll down).
  • NBC has storified political reaction to the Trayvon Martin slaying.
  • The San Jose Mercury News collected reactions to revelations that Mike Daisey fabricated portions of his story about Apple’s factories in China.
  • One of my students did a piece on the U.N.’s list of top 10 tourist destinations.
  • Finally, this week the Guardian’s technology editor documented a nasty Twitter dispute between a woman calling out Geeklist for a sexist video and some Geeklist guys who reacted rather defensively. (The following day, Geeklist apologized.)

This is crossposted at JAWS.org.