My Reflections on Storify

Credit: Flickr.com/EstherVargas

Tech writer, Lianne Cassavoy, describes Storify as a mixture of many different social media platforms: "a dash of Tumblr, and mix in a cup of Pinterest.  Sprinkle it with Facebook and top it off with Twitter, and you'd have Storify".  The new journalism platform was launched five years ago by Burt Herman and Xavier Damman, who had the vision that there are voices on social media that deserve to be published on mainstream media; Storify users curate these voices and turn them into stories.

My first thoughts on Storify were that it is lazy journalism.  To 'create a story' on the platform doesn't involve much thought of the user apart from deciphering which thoughts and opinions of other social media users are relevant to the topic being discussed.  It essentially seemed as though I was just passing on news curated by other people therefore making me unsure about how this could be classed as a form of journalism.

I have created four stories during my time on Storify:

A screenshot of my four stories on Storify.com

After learning a little more about how Storify works and what it is actually about, I began to really enjoy my experience creating stories about different topics in the news.  Although I still don't feel as though this is 'proper' journalism, I feel as though it is a good way of summarising a news story for anyone who wishes to read the news but doesn't want to search through masses of information to find the most important bits.  I based my stories on trending topics in the news and on Twitter, and used opinions from users on different social media platforms and articles on Google.  So, although I don't feel this news curation site can be classed as journalism in particular, I feel it is a really effective way to gain snippets of the news in a very concise manner.

My favourite Storify creation is titled "#RipOffRail" and discusses opinions on the rising rail fares for British passengers.

I have come to the conclusion that Storify works best when creating stories in relation to events.  By using the hashtag as the basis to my story, it left me a lot of room to gather any Tweets that used the hashtag to create a storyline showing the event from many different perspectives.  Since I created this story whilst the Hashtag was trending on Twitter, I was inundated with thousands of Tweets to search though; although this was time consuming, I was able to pick out the best and most relevant to the topic.

I found it very easy to find these different responses just by entering a couple of keywords, or even just the hashtag, into the search bar of the each social media tab.  The layout of Storify was very simple to navigate and I found it especially useful that you could drag and drop the different parts making it very easy to order and categorise each section.  I was able to categorise the main points of discussion and build a narrative around them simply by inserting my own words such as "the public took to Twitter to voice their opinions on rising fares".

One aspect of Storify that I did find particularly confusing, was knowing what percentage should be my own writing as opposed to the pre-curated news by other social media users.  Whereas some social media sites, such as Twitter, give you a character count limit, there was nothing on Storify that says how much of your own writing you should include.  I took this as an opportunity for Storify users to interpret the platform however they wished, without any boundaries or limitations to what they could create.  I interpreted Storify as a platform to create stories mainly made up of pre-curated news, and added my own information where I felt the story needed narration.

Screenshot of my own narration on my "Junior Doctor Strike" Storify.

Overall, my first thoughts on Storify were that it was just 'lazy journalism' as I could only see it as passing on news that has been curated by other people.  However, since creating my own stories on the platform, my opinions have changed dramatically.  Although I can't see the platform becoming a form of 'journalism', I can definitely see it being used as a way of sourcing news.  It is a fantastic way of summarising long news stories and events and I can definitely see it being used as an alternative way of gathering news, instead of searching through masses of articles and Tweets to find the same information.