Today my class was visited by Josh Stearns, Public Media Campaign Director at Free Press, which is a national non-profit public interest organization.  He spoke about Storify and how it can be used to help media today. Storify is an online tool where you can create a storry about a certain event using a mix of social media platforms, including tweets, Instagram photos, Facebook posts, and Flickr photos to make your story.

Here’s an example of a Storify story here.   I made one about the lettuce shortage that hit the US and Mexico this year.

Stearns has a lot of interesting points, including how Storify can be used as a social media platform, community engagement tool, a news desk, and even a database for modern journalists. I think Storify is really cool and I like to look at projects done by The Washington Post and The Guardian. You can even search for food related posts and stories.

Storify is a fun way to tell a story from the perspective of not only major news organizations, but from the citizens in the nation who have comments and opinions on each event and to share it with the world. I will definitely be playing around with it again soon.

-L