Sips from the Firehose

Oct 30

Hurricane Sandy Coverage on Storify: An Inflection Point?

Posted: under Uncategorized.
Tags: arbiters of reality, citizen journalism, Community, Current Affairs, disaster porn, faked photos, Hurricane Sandy, journalism, New Media Strategery, photoshop fakery, responsible journalism, social media, TinEye, trolls, Unconventional Research

In the past, we'd have to rely on the efforts of teams of photojournalists to comb over the wreckage, to find the enduring images, and then find a functioning film-development shop to soup the rolls of Tri-X or Kodak 400, and then try to get them to a still-functioning newspaper office to either get the shots on the AP wire, or get them onto the printing presses. I know - I covered the 1989 San Francisco earthquake under just such a set of circumstances. [...more]

Major news outlets use Storify to aggregate & make sense of social media flow about Hurricane Sandy

In the last two days, as we’ve all been inundated (pardon the lame water-related pun) with near-constant TV, radio, web & social media updates on the progress of Hurricane Sandy, one thing that stands out this time around (as opposed to previous disasters) is that, having had time to prepare, the major media outlets turned to Storify to pull together live coverage of the storm, via the thousands (millions?) of ad-hoc citizen reporters who were posting so many TwitPics and Facebook updates.

The front page design of Storify has gotten much better over the past year, and shows the clear stamp of the current trend towards “Pinteresting” everything. Still, when you look at the content mix that has made it to the front page, you can see just how widespread the Storification of Sandy has been…

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