A social media journalism story – Tent City in Lakewood New Jersey

Storify is a recent tool (released April 2011) utilizing resources from various social media and web contents to tell a story. It has seen quick and wide adoptions by reporters as well as educators. Some people even use Storify to create interactive resume for job applications.

I created a story about the Tent City in Lakewood, N.J., which has attracted attention of national media as “a living demonstration of what the economy is doing to people.” It tells about the makeshift settlement for homeless people in Lakewood and how the Lakewood city officials try to close the site and evict its residents.

The reason I chose to work on this story is that it is located not far from where I work, and a few of my students have volunteered there for some time.

This Storify story makes use of Youtube videos, twitter tweets, google interactive maps, online comments, online news articles, and photos – typical elements to build a Storify story.

Some journalism instructors have incorporated Storify in their teaching and have developed some guidelines for journalists (in this case, students) using Storify. I want to add some of my thoughts on using Storify for effective news storytelling:

• Plan the story structure beforehand – you are not supposed to dump a lot of relevant pieces together for the reader to figure out what happened.
• Provide adequate contexts/background – you cannot expect anyone reading your story to be familiar with the subject to begin with.
• Select social media elements wisely – choose those elements that best support/buttress what you write in the intro/transitions.

So, how can we incorporate this tool into classroom instructions? If students work on a Storify story assignment, the topic they choose needs to be newsworthy and manageable; for instance, a recent newsworthy person or a regional issue in recent news. I wanted to do a Storify story about China vice president’s state visit to the U.S. in February 2012, only to find that (a) I could not decide on a story focus or angle and (b) the information is just overwhelming, unmanageable; so I gave up.