How a teenager's tweet turned on our newsroom to Storify

When I first began this journey into multimedia journalism, I wanted to use a combination of text and video to tell stories. My goal was to create a text story that would replace printed quotes with videos, so people could actually watch and hear soundbites from courtroom testimony, attorney arguments or judges' rulings.

I never got around to it, for one because it was too time consuming, and I would have to include the quotes anyway for print versions. But I still thought there would be a way to take multimedia content and put them together to tell a story.

Storify came along and solved those problems. Developed with the help of a former AP reporter, Storify was created for journalists by journalists. You take content from the web, via Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or other social media sites, and place it on a timeline. Storify gives you text boxes to write headlines, a lede and transitions. As with any story, the reporter drives the narrative. The quotes are taken from real-time social media. You can even make embeds of specific URLs.

The perfect story hit our newsroom recently, when the office of the Kansas governor impulsively reacted to a critical tweet from a high school senior. The story exploded.

The day after my colleague Suzanne Tobias broke the story, I mentioned that it would be perfect for Storify. She had never used it before, so I gave her a quick walk-through. Within minutes she was building her Storify account that truly captured the reaction happening across the Twitterverse. It would end up nominated for Storify's Story of the Year, along side stories about arrests at the Occupy protests and the chronicling of uprisings across the Middle East.

I had been using Storify to document community reaction throughout the year spurred by our coverage of sex trafficking in Wichita.

The Storify timeline is simple. You search for content in a panel on the right side of your screen, then when you find what you want you drag and drop it into the timeline at left. Hit "publish." You can then grab the embed code, as you would for a video, and drop into a blog post or a story file for your web site. If you look at the metrics on Suzanne's storify, you'll see most came from the embed from Kansas.com.

Tip: It will save you a lot of time if you identify your story early and begin grabbing tweets or other content. Storify search only goes back a day or two. I began the story related to our human trafficking project months ago, grabbing key bits throughout the year, even though I didn't publish the final product until last month.

Although Storify has a place to pull content off Facebook, I've found that to be difficult and kind of clunky, probably because of various privacy settings.

There's now even a Word Press Storify plug-in that works from directly from the dashboard.

If you're not using it, you're missing out on a valuable tool for online journalism, and an simple way to turn tweets, blog posts and other web content into a cohesive, long-form narrative.

'Link journalism' means remembering the links

Reading Danny Sullivan’s “How the Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit,” my first thought was:

“Dude, I feel you pain: about 30 years of it.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve busted my butt to turn out an exclusive story, only to see a broadcast outlet swipe my hard-earned facts, with no new reporting, and use it as their own. Without credit.

Then there’s the age-old strategy of The Associated Press – take a story from a member newspaper, write a new lead, and move it across the country.

But I’m not only the victim in all this, I confess to being a conspirator. I think all of us have had an editor at one time or another run up to us waving a story from a competing news organization, saying, “We need this story. Go out and get it.” What they mean is, go out and get a story just like it and don’t tell anyone we got the idea from another organization.

Not one to argue with the person who provides I paycheck, I comply, although I’ve always tried to add depth, context or new reporting.

But Sullivan makes great points in tracking how his story about a woman suing Google over its walking directions.

With link journalism, we need to be more cognizant of crediting sources by linking back.

From when I first worked for a newspaper that decided it needed a web site – in 1998, and we thought that was behind then – grabbing links of research has been a practice. Editors would always ask for “web extras” and reporters would shrug and say, “What’s that.” A list of links found during research worked to give readers context and more information.

Then came upload source documents, as Sullivan did, so people could see where we were getting our information.

Now with delicious and Publish2, it’s easier than ever to save those links. Download the browser tool bars, click and save. Then share the list with your web team and they can run it, or embed it into the story.

Old news, you may say? You know this already, don’t you?

Well, read Sulllivan’s post and you’ll realize that while this may be basic online journalism, too few people are doing it.

Photo galleries show cool way to display writing, too

Photographers love photo galleries. It really shows off their work. Online editors love photo galleries, because it builds up page views with each click.

Now writers can use galleries to great effect. See what MSNBC did with a gallery in telling the narrative of one of the richest, and most reclusive, women in the America.

The photos themselves may not have been strong enough to stand lone themselves. But with strong words, they play off each other, like a picture book.

The Times Herald-Record used a similar approach in the story of a man who spent decades in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

I see all sorts of uses for this kind of story-telling, with evidence photos from court, or to spice up zoning and development stories. The photos help set up a sense of place and drive the words.

Textual healing: The Roeder trial ends with a shot for out web site

Covering a murder trial can be as invigorating as it is grueling. The pressure increases when that trial becomes a national story, as it did with Scott Roeder, convicted of murdering Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.

As I said last week, I was assigned to report for web only. Another reporter took care of the print story. I did what I had been doing for the past two years of court reporting, using Twitter for my dispatches.

I’ve received attention for tweeting trials before. But this time, more people than ever were watching my twitter feeds. And we learned even more how valuable it was to driving traffic to our web sites.

Web producer Eba Hamid said early in the trial that every time I tweeted a link to a courtroom video, it got double the page views.

At the end of every trial, I routinely ask people for feedback, and I got 11 pages of responses.

Among them:

• @lummox_ict: @rsylvester Thanks for the tweets! Could you do the same thing for Avatar.
• @JenWPortraits: Thanks again to @rsylvester for lowering employee productivity all over Wichita this week. Great job!
• And @ryansholin (who introduced me to Twitter): @rsylvester’s tweets from the Roeder Trial kept me engaged with a story I’d usually only read as a headline from a national news org.

Back in the newsroom, Eba and content editor Lori O’Toole Buselt took my tweets and crafted them into text blocks for the daily trial updates. I would tweet links to those throughout the day, so people could catch up without having the read thought a bunch of tweets, scattered in the timelines with the rest of their Twitter friends.

Without rewriting the day’s events for print, however, I found myself missing one important element of what I do: writing and storytelling.

Sure, I always say Twitter helps you right tight. With a 140-character limit, there’s no room for wasted words. And people like you to filter their information. We are journalists, after all, and that’s what we do. But it’s just not the same as crafting a good story.

I got to do that at the end of the trial. My tradeoff for doing web only was I agreed to work on a narrative that was supposed to run in Sunday’s newspaper. It was a magazine-length article, taken from the week’s testimony. But when the obits ran two long in Sunday’s paper, it was sent to the web site only.

I'd been totally shut out of print for this trial.

Did it matter? Well, it was the No. 1 read story today on Kansas.com. It drew more readers, comments and reactions than the weekend’s basketball game between the University of Kansas and Kansas State, the local Wichita State basketball team, and an online database of traffic tickets that had dominated the top spot with readers for weeks.

It also shows people will read a story, no matter where it's told.