How to Storify

STORIFY:
How to curate
social media
ENTERPRISING | ENGAGING | ENTERTAINING | ENLIGHTENING

AGENDA
• What is Storify?
• Why use Storify?
• Be a social media player
• When to Storify
• How to use it
• Best Practices

What is Storify?
• Storify is a website that helps you present a story by
curating social media posts, mostly through Twitter.
• Sometimes, the Storify IS the story on your site; other
times, it supplements your articles.

Why use Storify?
• You help your readers sort through all the social media
noise and share the best or most representative material.
• Sometimes, you can’t get to the scene fast enough. Let
social media be your eyes and ears.
• Storify is a good way to capture the emotion of what’s
happening in your community – people are worried about
an impending storm; they’re excited their team is in the
championship; they’re proud a local athlete is in the
Olympics, etc.

Why use Storify?
“We did not intend for people to just throw together social
media and create a scrap pile of tweets. The name is ‘Storify’
because it’s about making stories. It’s about changing how
journalism works to acknowledge the fact that everyone on the
ground is potentially your eyewitness, and it’s about
empowering journalists to draw from that source material.”
-- Burt Herman, Storify CEO and co-founder

Be a social media player
You have to consume social media, too.
• Follow the right accounts: Your Twitter experience is what you make of it. Be
sure to follow accounts that will inform you and have something to offer – local
and state police, other government departments (e.g. DPW), politicians,
businesses, colleges, active citizens, other news agencies.
• Share and listen: Establish yourself as a social media contributor – post
information people want (there’s traffic on Main Street; 2-hour delay for school),
with or without links back to your site; share a video or photo; tell them it’s a
beautiful day. Don’t just poke in during breaking news and expect people to
engage with you.
On the flip side of the coin, listen. Pay attention to what people are saying. Look
for news. Look for repetition to spot a trend.

Be a social media player
You have to consume social media, too.
• Pay attention to your
personal accounts:
I’ve heard of several
opportunities recognized
because an editor
noticed their personal
Facebook friends were
all talking about the
same thing. If your
friends are all talking
about something,
chances are your
readers are, too.

When to Storify
IMPORTANT!
• Your idea can be a good one, but it’s useless if no one is talking: You
need fodder. People need to be talking about whatever you want to gather on
social media. Poke around Twitter to be sure there’s a conversation before
you start building the Storify.
You can either wait for momentum to build around a conversation, or you can
get the ball rolling by posting something such as, “What do you think about
the new ban on plastic bags?” Suggest a #hashtag so it will be easy to find
the responses.

When to Storify
Look out your window
• Stuff that’s happening around you:
• Breaking news (can gather
your reporters’ tweets)
• Traffic
• Storm/weather
• Beautiful sunset/rainbow
• Local government decision

When to Storify
What’s on TV?
• Because we love to tweet while watching ‘Scandal’
• National sports
• American Idol
• State of the Union
• Award shows (Oscars, Grammys)
• Walking Dead
• Downton Abbey

When to Storify
National trending
• It’s not local, but man, people are talking about it.
• Pop culture
• State of the Union
• #Snowmageddon
• Holidays
• Big news elsewhere (e.g., Newtown)
• The left rail of Twitter = Trends

When to Storify
Local thing/person goes big
• Your community’s heart fills with pride!
• Local on American Idol
• Local in Olympics
• Business honored by industry
• Local actor in show
• Local attraction
highlighted in a
national magazine

When to Storify
Local Sports
• The kids are doing it, so should you
• If a game is lively on social media,
pull it together after as a recap.
• Applies to high school and youth
teams, all seasons
• Compile staff reporter/photographer
who live tweeted the game.

How to Storify
1) Create an account
Use a paper-wide username, email
address, password.
Follow the prompts and be sure to
connect the account to your
publication’s Twitter account so you
can easily notify people when
they’ve been “quoted” in your
Storify.
2) Do some homework
Before you create a new Storify, you
may want to poke around Twitter
first to be sure a conversation is
even happening around your topic.

How to Storify
3) Log in to Storify
4) Start a new Storify:
Click on “New Story” button in the upper right
corner to start a new Storify, or click on your
account icon and choose Profile to find
existing Storifies.
NOTE: The system will autosave as you go.

How to Storify
The left side of the screen is your timeline or story. The right side is where you find
your material. Think of the right side as your notebook full of quotes and the left is
where you’re writing your story.

How to Storify
headline
description
5) Fill in the fields on the left
Write a headline and description. You may want to add your newspaper website’s
URL so people who find your Storify through Storify know who you are.

How to Storify
6) Find information on the right
Work your way through the various
social media channels for content.
Twitter and Instagram are usually
the most successful because they
allow you to filter by location,
whereas with the other platforms,
you can only search for users or
keywords.
But if your topic is so specific that
a keyword would surely yield local
content, go ahead and search on
Facebook, etc.

How to Storify
STORIFY: You can add a Storify button to your browser toolbar
(https://storify.com/tools) and when you see something online that you want
to later use as Storify fodder, just click on the button. You’ll find the content
under this tab, under Saved Elements. You can also search for material on other
Storifies, either from your own account or others’ accounts.
TWITTER: This is usually the most successful platform from which to draw
content. Within it, you can filter by Search (keywords); User (a Twitter
username); Favorites (a Twitter username); Timeline (pull in a Twitter account’s
timeline, so basically everyone that account follows); List (a Twitter list you or
someone has created; a targeted collection of Twitter accounts). (continued on
next slide)

How to Storify
TWITTER (cont’d): Within
SEARCH, you can also filter by
Type, Location and Language.
Location is the most helpful.
Type in a keyword, then click
on Location, type in a
city/town and a map pops up
with a radius from 1-25 miles.
Click on the slider at the
bottom to narrow or broaden
your search area.
Hit return in the Search box.

How to Storify
FACEBOOK: You can filter by Search (keywords within posts); Comments by
URL (a URL with Facebook comments); and Comments by ID (a Facebook
post ID #).
GOOGLE+: You can filter by Activities (essentially a keyword search) and
People (Google+ accounts).
YOUTUBE: You can filter by Search (keywords) and User’s videos (YouTube
account name). Be sure to watch the movie after you drag it to the left.
FLICKR: You can filter by Search (keywords) and User (the Flickr account
name).

How to Storify
INSTAGRAM: You can filter by Tag Search (#hashtags/keywords); Location
Search (town/city); User (Instagram account username). Note: It does not
appear you can combine a keyword and location search, like you can in
Twitter. It’s one or the other.
GOOGLE: You can do a Google search for content by using Web, News,
Images and gif.
LINK: You can plug in a web URL to provide a link to a site or image. For
instance, if there’s an image on your website you’d like to include, but it’s
not posted on any of the social media platforms, you can right click on the
image on your site, choose “Copy Image Location,” then paste it in to this
Link “Embed URL” spot.

How to Storify
There are other, more obscure
platforms from which you can
choose.
Just click on this button to reveal
the other sources:

How to Storify
7) Select posts to use
When you find material on the right that you want to use, click on it and drag it
to the left. You can delete it from the left later if you decide not to use it.

How to Storify
7) Select posts to use
As you’re going through the material, themes will emerge. You’ll start to see
how you can organize similar thoughts. You’ll start to focus on those themes
when sorting through the posts. You’ll start to see repetition and will either
choose more of the same to drive a point home or avoid repeats because
you’ve already gotten your point across.
It’s this process that you’ll learn to develop. The mechanics of the platform are
pretty easy. But just because you know how to work a video camera doesn’t
make you Steven Spielberg. You’ll figure out how to best curate the material to
produce a great “story” for your readers.
You’re a journalist – you already know how to do this!

How to Storify
8) Restructure your story
Once you have a bunch of posts on the left, rearrange them to appear in the
order you think makes sense. Simply click, drag and release in the new spot
you want the post to appear.
9) Add text/connecting thoughts
A Storify should not just be a dump of tweets. There should be a narrative, and
the posts serve as “quotes” supporting the narrative.
Click anywhere between posts to add text. A box will pop up. Just start typing.

How to Storify
10) Finalize
Delete unwanted posts by clicking on the X in the top right of the box.
You can style the text as needed.

How to Storify
11) Preview
You can see how the Storify is shaping
up by clicking on the Draft button and
choosing “Preview Draft”
12) Publish
When the Storify is done, click on the Publish button at the top….
And then select “View and
Publicize It.”

How to Storify
13) Notify people on
social media
A pop-up window
allows you to craft a
tweet to send to
people “quoted” in
your Storify. It
provides text, but you
can amend it. You
might want to
pointedly ask them to
retweet.
Check off all the
accounts you want to
“tweet at.”

How to Storify
14) Notify people on
social media
The goal is that the
people quoted will
retweet the link to
their followers. In this
case, the link brings
them to Storify.
If you want, you could
make note of these
users and later
@tweet them
manually, but include
the link to your article
page so you get the
traffic.

How to Storify
15) Grab the embed code
In the upper right corner of the page you land on after sending notifications,
click on Embed.

How to Storify
16) Grab the embed code
You can experiment with the
various options, but the best
ones are:
• Full header
• Story template
• No border
Copy the embed code.
17) Paste the embed code
Paste it into the HTML box of
either the EditUI article or the
digital article.
Check your site to be sure it’s
surfacing OK after you publish.

BEST PRACTICES
• Try different search words
Blizzard, snow, Snowmageddon, storm – try the various words people may use.
• Use competitors’ posts only when necessary.
• Write a catchy headline for your site. Two approaches:
STORIFY: What people are saying about the storm
vs.
Cleaning up after the blizzard
• Promote it on Facebook
Include the link to your site so you’ll get the traffic, as opposed to directly to
Storify.

BEST PRACTICES
• Don’t use posts that include offensive language.
• Take a look at the user’s name, handle and photo to be sure they aren’t
offensive.
*THAT*
guy

MORE INFORMATION
If you have questions or suggestions, contact
Regional Digital Editor for GateHouse New England
Nicole Simmons
• nsimmons@wickedlocal.com
• ghnewsroom.com/blogs/nicolesimmons
• @Digital_Nicole
• 508-626-3923

How to Storify

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