Thing #7: Making Multi-media stories with Storify

When I opened Storify the first news story immediately caught my attention: “Chinese Military Linked To Cyber Attacks On U.S. Sites.” I found this story to be really interesting because I had been hearing a little bit about it over the past day or so and I wanted to learn a little bit more about it. The story claims that the Chinese army has apparently tried to hack into US companies and business including the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal. Not surprisingly, the Chinese government has denied the allegations as “groundless” but the painting is on the wall. Overall, this is rather disturbing but when you think about it, I am sure the United States is doing similar things to the Chinese.

After messing around on Storify I decided to have my hand at my own story. I decided to post something about the Chicago Blackhawks and theirrecent hot streak. I actually really liked using the website because it was very user friendly and I was able to include sources from multiple places that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. In terms of writing this in comparison to an old fashioned news story, I found this method to be much more enjoyable. It was far less time consuming and if you have a simple idea for a story, the ability to grab bits from various social media sources makes crafting the story itself very simple. It also gives you the chance to include the ideas and comments that average people have from places such as twitter or facebook which allows a news story to have a more meaningful impact.

One really interesting aspect is that you can use other peoples tweets in your story. Personally, I don’t know how I feel about it because I like to keep what I am saying to my “Followers” but at the same time we have to realize that social media is meant to be social so it really wouldn’t bother me too much if my stuff showed up elsewhere. Plus, there is probably a way to turn off that feature if I really wanted to.

Of course there are given limitations to these types of stories, most notably being that anyone can make a Storify story about any topic they want and they have the right to include nearly anything they see fit. With that in mind, it is quite clear that people can probably fabricate anything they wanted –which isn’t any different than anything else on the internet already.