“Drag and Drop” Journalism: The Modern Day Storify

As part of our third year ‘News and Journalism’ module, we were asked to explore Storify. An online citizen journalism tool that is best known for its news curation, by allowing its users to search, select and pull together the focal ‘voices’ on social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, in order to produce a story or timeline. Being a tool that was very new to me and something I was therefore unaware of how to really use, I took to YouTube to see how others selected a piece of news and turned it into their own story.

YouTube: Storify Tutorial

Realising this journalism tool wasn’t too hard to grasp, I had a go at producing a story for myself. What I found particularly interesting was the notion of “drag and drop” or “copy and paste” journalism. As a user, I was taking an existing headline and adding my own exciting spin on the story as a way of reporting it back to other citizen journalists.

Screenshot: Storify

 Our assignment had a particular focus on the spread of news through the social media platform Twitter, therefore when creating a story I would only use the ‘Twitter’ search bar. Even though I was able to pull together some really attention-grabbing, applicable tweets from both professional news outlets and everyday tweeters, I was limited in the information I could apply to my story. If I had the opportunity to use other social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, or I was able to apply a YouTube clip, or a personal image, my news story would be more in depth and analytical and would thus appeal to a wider audience.

Screenshot: Storify

Screenshot:Storify

Simple enough so it seemed to drag and drop a tweet of your choice, the website did suffer from a few glitches, which meant that the search bar would not load the Twitter feed and this affected my ability to select the relevant material. Although only a temporary issue, I did also come across another hurdle. I found that seeking an account was extremely username sensitive and if the username was not correct to the letter, number or symbol then the appropriate account would not load. Additionally, many of the notorious news outlets updated their Twitter frequently (and I mean every 10 minutes), so searching for that ‘right’ tweet was sometimes very time consuming. Also one of the stories I posted, the news outlet from which I read the original article had not posted that particular news story on their Twitter feed, therefore I would have to look for the story on other news outlets.  

Not wanting to present just my negative perceptions of this journalism tool, I was intrigued by the way in which the site posed as a form of news curation. A specific news story would in essence be reproduced by drawing in elements from external ‘citizen’ reporters or news outlets on Twitter.

I particular enjoyed pulling together and narrating a story on the Guardian’s “Largest UK sperm bank turns away dyslexic donors”

Screenshot: The Guardian

This was a controversial topic that caused wide spread debate over Twitter.

Screenshot: Storify

Screenshot: Storify

Taking snippets of 140 character news writing and integrating them to form a newly established narrative was a great way for me as a student to gain a greater understanding of what is going on in the news and also allow other individuals to see my own perception of something recently reported on in the news. 

Screenshot: Storify

Screenshot: Storify

A tool that at first displayed itself as lazy and straight forward journalism, has altered my perception to what I believe to be the new form of journalism for the future. 

Check out my Storify here.