January 20, 2012

The Washington Post
Burt Herman tells the Post’s Innovations blog that Storify, which has become a popular way to assemble bits of social media into a story, was created through a classic process of innovating through iteration and user feedback.

“We had an earlier product that we were working on, which was was all about Twitter and making it look more readable for normal people, and that ended up not being as engaging. We actually did an experiment with a thing that let you embed a single tweet into a post, and that seemed to really have a lot of interest …  So we went in that direction … It’s not at all that we sat down at first and figured out what this was going to look like from scratch.”

In another video Herman says that social media is great material for a story, but isn’t a story in itself. || Related: Storify is starting to look like a news site (ReadWriteWeb) | The 5 types of stories that make good Storifys (Poynter) | Burt Herman shares lessons from launching Storify (Poynter)

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Steve Myers was the managing editor of Poynter.org until August 2012, when he became the deputy managing editor and senior staff writer for The Lens,…
Steve Myers

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