A Story with Storify

Curation is the act of finding, organising and then sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue. By curating news, journalists are able to find second hand information from different sources.

By using Storify as a prime example of a curation tool, users are able to curate information on a certain topic and create 'stories'. Users have the choice of being able to filter through various social media platforms. As Storify is able to aggregate news items from all social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Flickr), users can easily 'drop and drag' items from the side bar in to their blog, or 'story'. Aggregation is a collection, or the gathering of items. In this particular case, this would be the collection of news stories, and certain opinions from various sources. On Storify the user is able to identify to keywords in specific stories, so finding links to other sources is extremely easy.

Montserrat-Howlett (2014), described in her article 'How to Fuel Your Curated Content Marketing with Storify', that 'Storify is a social media platform with more than 850,000 journalists, agencies, and brands sharing stories...the link leads back to the original source, notifying the person that they've been mentioned. Keep a database of those people you mention, and nurture those relationships to build your following.' 

Storify explains that 'everyone is now a reporter'. 

https://storify.com/storify

Posts are then embedded in the user's own content. Before using Storify personally, I was actually unaware of the website and the curation tools it offers. 

Click here to see my Storify page. 

It gives users the opportunity to curate information in an almost interactive way. As mentioned in a previous post, journalism is no doubt turning into a digital 'era'; and Storify just further exemplifies this point. It gave me an understanding of how large the spectrum of journalism actually is, yet it was able to break it down in to a microcosm - with easy access to most social platforms online. 

By having so many sources at my finger tips, I was able to construct a clear form of story due to the variety of material accessible. However, the curation process was slightly time consuming, depending on how recent a news item was that I wanted to write about. It was also problematic whether certain aspects of the story I wanted to include were even going to be available through Storify. It seems as if Storify wants users to be able to comment on the most up-to-date stories in the news, going alongside its fresh and modern outlook on journalism.  

The layout in Storify is clear, although editing tools are limited. Users will not be able to personalise their layout, fonts or headers as they would do on a normal blog. Although I thought this was a slight disadvantage, it just highlights the fact that Storify is not somewhere in which are user would go if they wanted a customisable 'blog' as such, but their primary aim being purely for the curation of material and further publishing stories and reflecting on recent news material. 

By including them in your own 'story', they should be used as depth and context to your work; it was not intended, however, to be a repetition of other content. Storify posts are almost an extension of other news stories; I have found that users portray this information in an entertaining, and sometimes humorous way. 

So not only is Storify used primarily for curation, but users are then able to create their own content on their own views of what they have initially curated - this stemming from citizen to professional journalism. It has helped me to become aware of a new form of journalism that is arising; and how Storify has turned the act of curation itself into an interactive narrative form.