At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week, one of the new tools to emerge — besides, that is, Lark, the new app that wakes you “silently, without a jarring alarm” — was Storify. Founded by Burt Herman (a former AP reporter and founder of the journotech meetup group Hacks/Hackers) and developer/entrepreneur Xavier Damman, the platform promises a new way to leverage the real-time power of social media for creating stories. It’s doubling down on the increasingly common assumption that the future of news will demand curation on the part of news producers.

How does it work? With the caveat that the platform’s still in closed beta, it seems only appropriate to write the rest of this story using Storify.

Conclusion? The platform, at least in its current beta stage, might not be ideal for longer, text-heavy stories: The text field is a bit clunky, and the modular system lends itself more to narrative interruption than to flow. Still, the multimedia presentation aspect, used smartly, could be a refreshing counterpart to more traditional, text-heavy stories. (See for example, Penn professor and Wired blogger Tim Carmody‘s engagingly Storified tale of a follower (re)quest.) And, for breaking news, where journalists might just be interested in the quick curation of tweets and videos, Storify’s drag-and-drop simplicity could be amazingly useful. It’s a simple mechanism for curating and contextualizing the atomized tumult that is the web — a little lifesaver for selected bits of information that otherwise might be lost to the news river’s rapids. As Herman puts it, “stories are what last.”