Storify: A different way to report news that breaks on Twitter
Last week, Carolyn Porco, the Empress of the Cassini Imaging Team that has brought us so close to Saturn (I can’t say for sure whether “Empress” is her exact title) got involved in a Twitter exchange with Mike Brown of Caltech, the self-proclaimed Planetkiller whose research helped send Pluto to the morgue.
Both are outstanding astronomers, with real titles you could look up, which is what made their exchange so interesting. It began with a press release from Caltech in which Brown and his team made claims that Porco and her team disputed. This caught the attention of reporters who cover astronomy, including Nadia Drake of Science News, who told me about it. The Porco-Brown exchange was strongly worded at points, but ended with a good-natured sign off. Brown tweeted that he had “no more time for kiss-and-make-up with @carolynporco,” and she shot back with “Ciao, and have a good flight. (I think we gave everyone quite a show!)”
You can see a straightforward news wrap-up of the exchange written by Paul Sutherland at Skymania. That’s the way we usually do these things.
Drake offered to do a quick Storify version of the exchange and send it to me. For those of you who don’t know–and I know many of you already do–Storify is a website that allows you to quickly pull together tweets, documents, Facebook posts, and all sorts of other things to assemble a story. You can also add comments and explanatory sections anywhere you like. It’s quick, and while it’s not a replacement for traditional stories, it’s a quick way to generate a post that puts readers a little closer to the primary sources–and still allows the author to add outside reporting.
Interestingly, Storify was the invention of Burt Herman, a 2009 Knight journalism fellow at Stanford. More about the history and use of Storify can be found here. It has already received $2 million in venture capital. Not bad for a fellowship project.
You can find Drake’s Porco-Brown Storify post here. She says it took her 10 minutes, which, even for AP alums like me, is pretty fast work. I added links to a press release and a paper near the top, which took me about 30 seconds.
If you’re blogging or working for an online news site, try Storify. I hope to make use of it here on the Tracker. And editors: Give your folks the opportunity to try it. Our readers will let us know what they think, and that might tell us whether Storify is likely to stand or fall.
- Paul Raeburn
