Thursday, July 26, 2012

Diplomacy 2.0 - Storyful and Storify


Storyful is presented as the social network whose aim is ‘to create an authentic cooperative and socially useful journalism’. Many of the contributors are not journalists, but their social media activities – specifically Twitter – due to the fact that they are in the middle of the events. It does not mean that what do they air is the absolute truth and thus, the reader has the responsibility of carefully connect the information with other previous or ulterior sources.

Most specifically, Storyful gather the most important news on Twitter and tries to recreate the full picture of an event. Due to the demand of more information among journalists, it offers a paid version addressing the media organizations. Storyful was also partnered with YouTube for increasing the quality of the content offered to their readers.

A similar project was developed by Storify which was launched in2011 which operated similarly with the news from both Twitter and Facebook.

Both websites are easy to use and offer content that at a certain extent is filtered by the professionals which made the selection of Tweets and posts and include them in the big stories.

Advantages and disadvantages

In both cases, the systems are in process and thus it is difficult to make an evaluation and to give a definitive verdict. However, there are many advantages of using both systems, as a way to find out integrated news about the stories of the day. For instance, I watched a lot lately the updates regarding the terrorists attacks in Bulgaria, the situation in Libya and Syria. As a journalist, you can contribute and be included in news package and thus, your information is automatically spread to a diverse audience. The combination of the social media tools offers more authenticity to the media as for instance the cooperation between Storyful and YouTube. Social media tools offered a lot of possibilities for close investigation and authentification of the sources and the authors. It is truth that anyone with an Internet connection could post information but the good nose of the journalist continues to be to check the information at least from threereliable sources. Of course there are many entertainment and sport news that could be considered a waste of time for the foreign policy planners, but think about the effect of the stories about big international events and the effect on various calls for international help in areas affected by international crisis. The truth is in the eyes and responsibility of the authors. 

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