As news organizations downsize, entrepreneurs are stepping up with ways to fill the void. I took a look at one of those ideas this morning.
It is called Storify and according to their website, it is used to create stories by “curating social media." This, I suppose, means they see themselves as something of a museum, or repository, for the posts on facebook, twitter, and other social media websites.
So, I went to the Storify website and tried to develop a story, or is that storified a story. I didn’t like what I saw, or should that be, I didn’t like what I storified?
Essentially, it is a collection tool for aggregating disparate news elements on a given subject: Arab Spring, Thanksgiving, Justin Bieber or whatever. The aggregator has the option of adding some narrative, but in the examples I looked at it was primarily observations by bystanders, or just someone with an opinion.
Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb writes that he finds Storify one of his “favorite things on the Internet.”
On the other hand, Elena Zak of 10,000 Words was less than thrilled and posited my initial reaction. “Why was I using this instead of going out and finding real people to interview?”
Ms. Zak also points out that one of the most important parts of journalism – fact checking – takes a back seat in Storify.
I agree. Even trying to put together a simple story using Storify, I was struck with the enormous amount of time required to check if the collected observations were true.
I have no doubt that the bean counters at many news organizations will try and make use of similar technologies to cut costs, and that ordinary Joe’s will play journalist with it. But I still believe that rather than having someone sitting at a desk collecting observations, it is still better to have a journalist in the field collecting experiences and then distilling them into a narrative form.
There is certainly a place for a tool like this within a story, but as the story itself? I hope not.
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