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How to use Storify as a reporting tool

by Mallary Jean TenorePublished Dec. 28, 2010 6:08 am

Zombie Journalism
Storify has been getting a lot of buzz lately as a new tool that lets you pull in various elements of social media to build a story. On the Storify backend, you can enter a headline or a summary and search for tweets, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and other elements to tell your story and then reorganize the elements and add text to give them more context. You can also let the people in your story know it exists so that they can help it go viral.

In a post on her Zombie Journalism blog, TBD’s Mandy Jenkins outlined 10 ways journalists can use this new tool. Here are some of them:

• To curate topical content. NYU Studio 20’s East Village, for instance,used Storify when creating SocialDiningNYC, a site that features curated information about New York City restaurants.

• To create a social media/multimedia narrative. Jenkins used Storify to make sense of a story involving a death outside of a D.C. nightclub. The story had a lot of twists and turns, so she used Storify to illustrate the narrative in tweets, photos and documents.

• To organize your live tweets into a story. Michael Margolis of GetStoriedrecently did this. Jenkins pointed out that reporters who live tweet government meetings, press conferences and other events could use Storify to display their tweets and then weave in quotes and anecdotes to help fill out the story.

Mark Luckie of 10,000 Words also wrote a good piece on Storify and explainedhow journalists and newsrooms are using the tool.