• Curation Tool Storify Partners With MSNBC’s Breaking News For Sourced News Content

    Leena Rao

    Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

    Monday, August 8th, 2011
    Breaking news

    As you may know, content curation platform Storify, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall, brings together Tweets, Facebook Status Updates, videos and more from social networking sites to create a realtime view into a story or issue. Today, the startup is announcing a first of its kind partnership with Breaking News, an MSNBC-owned Twitter handle and web site for realtime updates on news breaking in the world.

    Here’s how Storify works. Storify allows you to build and embed a story around a gathering of Tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos and more Within Storify’s platform, you can simple search and drag content into your Storify story. Once you create a story with all of this curated content, you can then embed the actual story in your blog or content management system via single like of Javascript.

    With the Breaking News partnership, Storify users can now add updates from the @BreakingNews Twitter accounts, as well as other updates from the newswire. So Breaking News is now a source, similar to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others.

    What makes the partnership unique is that on BreakingNews.com, you can create a Storify story directly from a news story. Storify has created a special button (similar to the Tweet button or Like function), which allows anyone to create and embed a Storify story from a Breaking News piece.

    Co-founder Burt Herman explains that this is the first two-way partnership for Storify, where a publisher has integrated the creation tool on its website. And he’s looking to form similar source partnerships with other major publishers.

    Storify, which recently raised $2 million from Khosla Ventures, is already being used by a number of news organizations, including Al-Jazeera.

    Storify has been in public beta since April 25, and is about to cross 100,000 stories created, and is averaging 6.5 million story views per month across all sites.

    We’ve embedded an example of a Storify news story below.


    Company: Storify
    Website: storify.com
    Launch Date: December 11, 2009
    Funding: $2.02M

    Turn what people post on social media into compelling stories. With Storify, you collect the best photos, video, quotes from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere. It’s the best way to capture an event whether it’s a news event, a conference, a product launch, a wedding, … Social media streams flow, but stories last.

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