Social Media Archives | John Tedesco

When a news story is just the beginning of the conversation, try Storify

John Tedesco — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:09:07 +0000

Let’s say you want to share an interesting news story with your friends. You might use a variety of different tools — Digg, Twitter or Facebook to name a few — but the end result is usually the same. You share a link, and that link leads to one destination — the article.

But what if the news story is sparking a big reaction from readers? People are tweeting and blogging and posting interesting responses online. You might want to not only share the article, but also the conversation about the article.

Storify lets you do that.

Check out this story module I created on Storify about a celery recall at a food processing plant in San Antonio:

Under one link, you can embed news articles, tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, photos, blog posts … you name it. You can package this content, share it, and embed it on blogs, like I did in this post.

Storify is the creation of developer Xavier Damman and journalist Burt Herman, a former foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. Herman said they wanted to create a tool that helps people make sense out of the chaos of online content:

The idea comes from thinking about the future of journalism and the fact that everyone now is creating so much content. We’re flooded with Tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos and everything else. Everyone can be a “reporter” when an event happens. But not everyone is a “journalist” — making sense of an issue and giving the context. So we built a system to help people do this, take the best of social media and make it into a story — to “storify” it. The word itself is actually in the dictionary, and also comes from my AP days when editors would send messages to bureaus asking them to “storify” something.

So what makes Storify different from simply posting links to YouTube videos or Flickr photos in a normal blog post? In Storify, the tweets, photos and other elements retain their interactivity. For example, you can retweet specific tweets from within the story. Storify is also pretty simple to use. You find photos, stories and other elements, click and drag them into a storyline, and publish it.

Blogs and news organizations are coming up with intriguing ways to use Storify. The news site TBD used Storify to create a chronology of events surrounding a death outside a nightclub.

The significance of Storify didn’t really click for me initially. Then I made the celery-recall story, shared it on Twitter and Facebook, and it dawned on me how it can improve the way people share information.

Normally I tweet a link to a website or article I like, some people retweet that, I might respond to those folks on Twitter, and that’s it. Now, if I want to, I can link to a story and the reaction to the story in one fell swoop. You can package an interesting destination of news, reactions to the news, videos, follow-up stories … all kinds of stuff.

Storify is for people who think a news story isn’t the end of a conversation, but the beginning of one.

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Stimulus critics sought stimulus money

John Tedesco — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 04:38:39 +0000

I had written some stories about local stimulus projects a few months ago, so it was interesting to read this report by the Center for Public Integrity that showed how elected officials who publicly criticized the Recovery Act had privately sought stimulus funds for their Congressional districts and states.

A cool thing about this project is that bloggers can embed the findings in their own posts. It allows their readers to search the documentation — and uses social media to help the story go viral.

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How journalists use social media

John Tedesco — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:37:07 +0000

In this great post at Mashable, Leah Betancourt profiled five journalists, including yours truly, and asked why we use social media:

There’s a lot of hype behind measuring social media ROI. But what about the payoff on an individual basis? Those who invest time into social media on a daily basis need to see a return on that time to make it worthwhile. Journalists who regularly use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook on the job with success make it part of their daily routine, and focus on communicating quality content that’s worthwhile to recipients.

Read more: About John Tedesco

There’s good advice for everyone in this post — not just journalists. “Though this post focuses on journalists, many of their tips can be more broadly applied to anyone working with social media tools.”

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Government Accountability Office now on Twitter, YouTube

John Tedesco — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:52:26 +0000

If you’re researching a topic related to the federal government, chances are the Government Accountability Office has already looked into the issue and published a detailed report about it.

Now the GAO, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, is going all social media on us by setting up accounts on Twitter and YouTube.

This is a nice touch by a federal agency that for years has offered e-mail updates to subscribers, who can be notified about topics that interest them. I also noticed today that the GAO’s home page has an RSS feed.

The main resource I use is the GAO’s search page, which offers a rich source of material. You can do keyword searches on GAO reports going back to 1980.

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