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Key links:
Primary website:
storify.com
Primary Twitter:
@storify

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Storify is an online platform owned by Livefyre that allows users to create stories using elements curated from the social web.

Storify allows users to include information from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other publicly available sites to create embeddable narratives through a process of search, drag, and drop. The platform imports elements’ metadata into stories so that, for example, tweets’ authors, timestamps, and URLs become part of the stories that include them. Storify also allows for the post-publishing editing of stories.

Storify was founded by Burt Herman, a former AP journalist and the founder of the meetup group Hacks/Hackers, and the developer and entrepreneur Xavier Damman. It originated as part of Herman’s Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where he spent much of his year thinking about the real-time web and the increasing necessity of filtering it through narrative. (The project’s name comes from a common internal request from AP editors to their reporters: “Can u pls storify?”) The platform was launched in private beta at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2010, as a contestant in the conference’s “Startup Battlefield” competition.

Storify is the most prominent of a new crop of tools that attempt to curate — and archive — information and conversations contained within the social web. (Others include the services Curated.by and Keepstream, both of which focus on Twitter.) The service, with its broad goals of aggregation and contextualization, is also emblematic of the new journalistic mindset that GigaOm‘s Mathew Ingram has called “the curatorial instinct.” During Storify’s private beta period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS, TBD, and other outlets used the Storify platform to create social-media-based narratives. Al Jazeera English’s “The Stream,” a social-media-focused television show that debuted in May 2011, also heavily relies on Storify’s curation capabilities.

In February 2011, Storify announced that it had closed a $2 million funding round from Khosla Ventures, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In April 2011, Storify launched its platform in public beta. In November 2011, it redesigned its homepage to emphasize current major stories on social media, and in February 2012, it launched an iPad app.

Livefyre, a blog commenting platform, bought Storify in 2013.

Video:

Storify on how to use its service:

Peers, allies, & competitors:
Recent Nieman Lab coverage:
Dec. 14, 2017 / Christine Schmidt
Storify’s demise shows nothing lasts forever (but the use of social media embeds in stories persists) — Once known as a required tool for journalists to be “social-media savvy”, Storify will soon have gone the way of floppy disks, Google+, and relying on platforms for distribution (okay, maybe not that. Yet.) T...
Sept. 10, 2014 / Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford
Designer or journalist: Who shapes the news you read in your favorite apps? — What are the ethics of platform design? One of the reasons that Facebook study on user emotions was so controversial is that it touched on the kinds of ethics we expect — or don’t expect — from platform designers...
June 30, 2014 / Joseph Lichterman
FIFA has cracked down on that World Cup Twitter bot (and other people tweeting and Vining and GIFing goals) — Last week, we wrote about @ReplayLastGoal, a Twitter account that automatically tweets out a GIF and a video of each goal scored in the World Cup. Great idea! Interesting execution! But also a copyright violation, at lea...
Sept. 13, 2013 / Mark Coddington
This Week in Review: Encryption and censorship, and broadening the story of journalistic change — Encryption, surveillance, and academic freedom: There were a number of developments on the U.S. National Security Agency surveillance front this week, including reports on the NSA’s ability to grab data from smartp...
Sept. 9, 2013 / Justin Ellis
Storify sold to Livefyre in a merging of social curation tools — A tech startup with roots deeply entrenched in the journalism world is being acquired. Storify, the company whose social curation platform that has helped countless journalists round-up tweets into stories of their own, ...

Recently around the web, from Mediagazer:

Primary author: Megan Garber. Main text last updated: October 2, 2013.
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