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Doorsteps: media scrums after patiently waiting in inclement weathers to hurl questions (often limited to just three) at a politician before media handlers bundle them away to safety.

Securing those precious few minutes with a Senator or member of cabinet, after the formal and predictable political set-piece, was once part of my day-to-day beat as a political correspondent. I was on the campaign bus, on the rope lines, hovering at the back of halls, watching and waiting for that nugget of information, that gaffe, that leak that might deliver a delicious scoop.

Every morning now as Storyful’s Political Editor, however, begins by monitoring the frantic tweets of weary political journalists running through airport terminals, hoping to make connecting flights as they dash from state to state trying to keep pace with whirlwind politicians. While they’re boarding the delayed flights and taking to the skies, I’m taking to YouTube to begin my doorstep. There, some of the rules of traditional doorstepping still apply, even if the technology and means of securing a story differ to those on the ground. The output of our doorstepping ends up on Google’s US elections page and the Economist’s Electionism App, while a subscription channel with a continuous stream of video, tweets and stories is made available to clients such as The New York Times, ABC News and France 24.

1. News Sources: Knowing who and where

Every hour of every day of every month, the Storyful political team trawls YouTube for new ads by presidential candidates, Senate candidates, vice-presidential hopefuls, PACs, Super PACs, campaign groups, supporter groups and trade unions. Every movement on their official YouTube channels is monitored. Our other doorstepping activity moves to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, with each platform enabling us to operate akin to air traffic controllers. As a social media news agency dedicated to finding and verifying videos, tweets, and pictures from across 50 states, we stubbornly and relentlessly pursue all leads.

 
And, day in, day out, we discover videos and ads freshly cooked up for us on YouTube, before they’ve been born to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online articles and beyond. Newt Gingrich’s video message to his supporters, announcing his intention to withdraw the following day, was one such example. At the time of discovery on May 1 at 8am Eastern time, the Gingrich video showed zero views, had no Twitter mentions, no online references, no life outside of YouTube and was unknown to the world without. With the video verified, contextualized and Storyful-ed, our clients were alerted and its life began. It became someone else’s scoop:

In such moments of discovery, there is no advantage to being on the campaign bus, being on the delayed flight or being at the postponed and rescheduled doorstep. It’s a doorstep in the social media sense, a new and different kind of scoop. Often, it’s as thrilling as being the only one to doorstep a candidate, securing an exclusive and once-off soundbite.

2. News sense: Spotting a potential story

On April 3, 2012 when tweets rolled in on Storyful’s advanced Twitter searches that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were handing out sandwiches in Waukesha, Wisconsin, as the state went to the polls, our senses screamed “Story!”. A potential president and potential vice-president handing out sandwiches and dealing with slightly bemused customers needed to be seen to be believed. But more importantly, it instantly raised questions about the ethics of engaging with voters in this way on voting day. I opened half a dozen new YouTube tabs, searching multiple key phrases and words, refreshing, re-entering, re-wording and refining. Eventually, through rigorous trial and error, this turned up:

An hour later, #subgate had taken off. The Democratic Wisconsin Party was outraged at the publicity stunt and filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Board accusing the GOP candidate of “election bribery”.

3. Persistence: Knowing the story will come

When the GOP presidential candidates were heckled or glitter-bombed, when Romney was asked about his Mormon faith by an audience member, when Occupy protesters pulled off “mic-checks”, when Ron Paul supporters turned out in their thousands for rallies, when Romney and Gingrich held up Etch-a-Sketches at rallies, or when a Missouri caucus was shut down, trust and persistence were rewarded with quality video from people on the ground pulling out their phones to capture a moment in time. Equally, when tweets emerged revealing that Romney had been pranked by his own campaign staff and led into an empty rally on April Fool’s Day, we in Storyful knew one person would have the video: Romney’s so-called bodyman Garret Jackson, better known as @dgjackson on Twitter or DG Jackson on YouTube. Often, we sit with multiple advanced YouTube and Twitter searches and tabs open, each asking different questions, with different words and phrases hoping to capture video as soon as someone presses “upload”. In this case, two simple tabs were opened: one for Jackson on Twitter and one for Jackson YouTube. The stakeout began. It wasn’t long before the doorstep was over, with the arrival of the following video:

4. News Obsession: Spotting the patterns

All day every day we doorstep the candidates, the states, the PACs, the campaigners, the supporters and we come to quickly spot re-uploaded videos with new dates, and can immediately discount them. We learn to identify new and familiar videographers, all of whom become “sources” in the YouTube doorstep scenario. Each time, we discover a video of news value, it is duly matched to candidate calendars, local and national reports, Google maps and Twitter updates, as part of the verification process. And because we watch and rewatch videos, often dozens and dozens each day, we come to quickly spot the patterns. It wasn’t a politician, campaigner, financier, or voter who provided the political team with the most captivating story of the year to date, but a nine-year-old from Iowa whose videos kept cropping up on our political radar. Sam Wessels had us in awe, thanks to five videos uploaded to YouTube by his mother Lin. The videos showed Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann respectively being asked by Sam about their policies for children with disability, in particular those with autism.

An insatiable appetite for US politics and a drive to know and understand the personalities and policies are what drive the political team each day in Storyful. We find and alert ads before they’re discovered or advertised. We discover the first-time videographers at rallies and protests, and help share their story. We chase video when a story has words but no visual. We crystal-ball gaze, envisioning the potential stories, and prepare our doorsteps before the story breaks. Always, we take pride in offering unfiltered raw politics: no candidate, no issue, no state is ignored or forgotten if video, pictures, and tweets can reveal something about democracy in action.

Personally, I’m unlikely to return soon to running through airport terminals in a state-to-state adventure, or to stand on the rope line, waiting, waiting for the three-minute doorstep with a candidate. I will, however, be waiting on YouTube for the stories taking place away from the rope line and off the campaign bus. YouTube has become my doorstep.

This series of posts is called Inside Storyful – an attempt to describe what we do every day by the people who are working at Storyful. The last two posts have highlighted the editorial side of the organisation: Malachy’s post on how we verify the content we find on the social web before advising professional clients on whether or not to use it, and then Markham’s post last week that highlighted the emotional impact of this type of work. This week I’m going to highlight the other side of the proverbial house – our editorially driven technology and how we are working with clients to create new and exciting products which showcase the best of their content alongside ours using a variety of different platforms.

I came to Storyful after two years at The Economist based in their New York offices.  Contributing stories on environmental and web technologies, and running around NYC’s blossoming tech scene led me to economist.com, to help run digital product development.  While there, we worked on improving the way readers could engage with our content online and via the mobile web…all in an industry constantly in flux.  We started working with Storyful in Autumn 2011, on what I liked to think at the time was a forward-thinking product, a HTML5 web application that we called Electionism (an app that’s really a website, since you open it in your browser and don’t have to download it, but looks and feels like an app).

If you’ve got a tablet or smartphone, head on over to electionism.com, and take a look at the section entitled “Video powered by Storyful.”  Here’s what you’re looking at: a feed of videos from YouTube.  But it’s not just any raw feed—it’s a highly curated and edited feed of vetted, verified, quality, original content relating to the 2012 US elections, picked and highlighted by our very own best – Aine Kerr and Dara Healy.

This is what we’d call a public-facing Storyful product, where a user may sense a clear partnership between The Economist Group Media Lab (their internal innovation unit), The Economist’s 2012 Elections coverage and our user-generated content (UGC) curation services.

For the last few years, Storyful has been focused on building out a strong editorial team with some great technology and humans powering their curation.  Now, with a great team and streamlined processes, next on our list is more digital product development like Electionism. This is where we see further opportunities for publishers, brands, and even individuals to work with us on deepening their engagement with UGC content, and maybe even building a public-facing product.

What is this nebulous “Product Development” concept that people have been throwing around for the last few years?  Is it literally building something with your hands, or in some cases with your code and your keyboard?  Sometimes. Is it creating apps, websites, and audio-visual experiences? Sure! But the way we see it at Storyful is that product development is building anything off the back of our editorial product in partnership with our clients that better delivers news with impact and clarity from the highest quality user generated content.

As our CTO Paul Watson states “We are most excited about building tools for journalists to make sense of the ever-increasing volume of data on the web. Current systems leave it up to the user to parse the stream (of content) and provide no added value. The systems that do aggregate information get it all wrong. They give you a chart without the underlying data. They give you a map without the sources. Visualisations are nice but often miss utility, as they have to be useful right now in a breaking news situation, not 24 hours later as a post-hoc analysis of what happened.“

This is where Storyful’s product comes in.  Paul continues, “Journalists need depth, a dashboard of where to look and then the tools to go looking.  Importantly, we see mobile and tablet as part of a continuum of the Storyful platform, not separate developments. As journalists move about their day Storyful must move with them.  A mix of visionary thinking and immediate customer needs leads our product development process. We are a tech startup trying to develop for where the puck will be while maintaining enterprise grade systems for the likes of the big tech companies and publishers of all sizes.”

We work in agile (two-week development cycles) but are also fans of the Lean Startup concept, popularized by Eric Ries, and wonderfully summarized in this post by Fake Grimlock, our favorite Internet tech dinosaur.

In other words—we’re aiming to be reporters, publishers, and other social journalism startups’ new best weapons and friends…thanks to our combination of amazing curators and strong tech product.  And with a growing number of curated verticals, ranging from the US Elections to Weather to Viral to the 2012 Olympics, we see an ocean of opportunities.

Other products we’ve seen in the digital space that inspire us over the last year include:

Robin Sloan’s eBook App called Fish 

The Atavist, an innovative tablet nonfiction storytelling experience

Soundcloud’s mobile apps (audio, radio, podcasts, music)

The Guardian’s work with Data (great way of covering events, lots of open source and UGC)

New York Times Elections App (cool execution)

Storify (web and iPad app) (social media storytelling platform)

Mobile Commons technology (text messaging service + more)

Visual.ly (smart visualisation platform)

The Guardian Project and Witness’s Obscura Cam (an app that helps keep people documenting newsworthy events safer)

Al Jazeera The Stream (social media innovation)

WSJ Social Reader (social media innovation on Facebook)

Economist Radio (chrome extension and programme with Soundcloud)

IDEO’s books (great ideas around the future of books)

National Film Board (of Canada) apps (beautiful work)

Paper by Fifty Three (great drawing app)

Pocket (great app to read, view, listen to content later)

The FT’s web app (HTML5–they were the pioneers)

Counterparties by Reuters and Percolate (cool news product powered by tech and by 2 editors)

Shelby.tv (a platform on which to save and watch internet videos [and your friend's videos] later)

Longshot Mag (a 48 ish hour pop-up magazine)

Evernote (a great in-the-cloud note and presentation service)

Dropbox (storage in-the-cloud #enoughsaid)

Imagine what else we might be able to build with our content and feeds. Widgets? More apps? Radio? Shows with the best of our content for the day?  Custom builds in partnership with other great social journalism startups like Storify and Souncloud?  Well, this is what I was hired to manage here in NYC and globally. If you have any ideas or are inspired to build something and experiment with us, get in touch.

Recently, controversial war correspondent Robert Fisk drew flak from fellow journalists by dismissing the trauma suffered by in-country journalists covering wars. He said that they ‘can fly home if the going gets too tough, business class with a glass of bubbly in their hands’, and suggested that the only ones who need any form of help were the people whose homelands are directly involved. By that token, you can be sure Mr Fisk would pooh-pooh claims that journalists watching the war from thousands of miles away could be emotionally traumatized.

But with journalists increasingly excluded from war zones for prolonged periods (as in Syria) or ‘managed’ by being part of embeds (as in Iraq and elsewhere), access to independent news and imagery from the front line had become increasingly scarce. Pictures of civilian casualties were relatively rare. The explicit, scarlet gore of injury and the guttural howls of grief and fear were largely filtered out. Or, at least, they were until the Arab spring brought about a revolution in web video. It sent the demand from newsrooms for user-generated content from the ‘hot zones’ through the roof. And that meant that the people sifting that video for usable content [Storyful, on behalf of our news clients] were under greater pressure than ever to serve up that which was verifiable and safe for broadcast.

The nature of the footage, and how it came to be uploaded, was completely new. It was war reporting by civilians and activists holding camera phones inches away from other bleeding civilians and activists. It was completely unfiltered, first-hand footage, uploaded to YouTube unedited and in near real time. Their images showed women and children eviscerated in the street by shrapnel, bombs landing in normal neighbourhoods in Libya, Syria, Yemen and Egypt. YouTube, and other platforms like Bambuser, came alive with graphic, uncut imagery from the wars. Hundreds of hours a day poured onto the internet.

In the early stages of the uprisings, Storyful was a subset of a small group worldwide scanning social media intensely for actionable content. We joined Libyan Facebook groups, ran persistent searches in Arabic on YouTube and scoured Twitter for links. We searched intently for video that gave us clues as to movements on the ground, but in the process we found much of the ‘collateral damage’ – the human cost of war.

Facebook stream suddenly full of dead people and mutilated bodies. Happy anniversary, Syria.

— Markham (@markhamnolan) March 15, 2012

The process meant watching hundreds of hours of video so gruesome that most of it would never make it to television, but which was often important for establishing events currently taking place in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria. We saw horrendous things from what would otherwise have been hidden wars.

We saw videos of bodies sawn off by gunfire mid-chest, bodies with skulls blown open, gaping red and emptied of their brain contents by high-calibre gunfire. We saw children taking their last breath on camera, mothers howling in despair, hundreds of of bodies mutilated beyond belief and thousands of videos of protests and running street battles. We assisted a major TV client in screening hours of Syrian torture video for clues as to who was doing the torturing and where the videos came from. One in particular will never leave me, Syrian soldiers laughing as they whipped and kicked a man on the ground, while Vivaldi’s four seasons played in the background. It was sinister.

While others would rightly look away from such horror [mostly inflicted by government forces], we would look deeper, often forcing ourselves to rewind many times to ask what the graphic images could tell us so that we provide news clients with a picture of what was happening on the ground. We taught ourselves to detach from the gore and approach it journalistically, interrogating the scenes with questions.

Does this tally with what we’re hearing elsewhere? What size round would it take to do that damage to a person? Could this have been faked? What can background items in the video tell us about where that field hospital is located? What kind of tank is that? Do the Syrian Army have those in their armory? How did that Libyan activist get hold of that Belgian-made assault rifle? What size mortar would it take to break through that roof?

By internet proxy, we got deeper into the early stages of the wars in Libya and Syria than many journalists on the ground were able to, and saw its effects in close-up.  And as we took on new staff, ones who had not been at the desk all through the Arab uprisings, we realized that we were doing something rather extraordinary. The effects of wars like this on journalists in the field have been well documented, but never had journalistic desk-pilots like ourselves had to go through so much graphic imagery in such a short space of time.

Video of two guys dead on the floor, one with his skull blown open, a bloody mess. That’s not April fools, that’s Syria. Every damn day. — Markham (@markhamnolan) April 1, 2012

People deal with graphic imagery in very different ways. Social media platforms bring the gore, close-up, right into our office, and while some of us are willing to trawl it for journalistic nuggets, or have become somewhat numb from the process, we don’t ask everyone to do the same. There is a reason, after all, why western audiences do not get to see every unfiltered image. And yes, there are valid arguments that they should. But the cumulative effect of so much graphic imagery can certainly take a psychological toll. What’s more, you get comfortable with the familiar faces, the sounds of a live stream from a regular broadcaster, the earnest reporting of a Libyan civilian journalist, to a point that they become a familiar touchpoint in your day. Then, the war claims them, and their sudden absence hits like the death of a close colleague.

We have sought professional assistance in Storyful so that any staff affected by the images we see daily, mostly from Syria these days, can talk them through with a professional. It’s a responsible step to take, and in doing so we learnt about how deeply our people are affected by the news, and how diverse the different reactions to it can be. We don’t require everyone on staff view the graphic stuff. Some of it is unspeakably brutal, inhuman stuff. And we are, after all, humans first. Journalists second.

Two of the leading forces in social journalism have joined forces to create a unique real-time newswire.

Demotix has been a pioneer in the curation of user-generated photos and video and the promotion of citizen journalism. Storyful is the first news agency purpose-built for the social media age. Together, they have created a news channel that will deliver a stream high-value and rights-cleared images and video to news organisations.

Demotix will now deliver its content through a dedicated channel on the StoryfulPro platform, which is used by some of the world’s leading media organisations, including YouTube, ABC News and the New York Times. Clients will now have the ability to source from a comprehensive real-time feed of content, discovered and verified by Storyful alongside rights-cleared imagery from the Demotix network.

“This new channel meets the great challenge facing journalists in a social age,” said Storyful CEO Mark Little, “how can we find user-generated content that we can trust and safely use in our stories?”. Turi Munthe, CEO of Demotix, said: “By combining Storyful’s discovery and verification system with the vast reach of the Demotix network, we can offer a valuable commercial connection between the most authentic and compelling content creators and the most forward-thinking newsrooms”.

British writer Lynn Barber has scalped some formidable egos in her time. Laced with acerbic scrutiny, her interviews have become something of renown in the British Isles. Her secret? Approach. She confessed in a 2010 interview to beginning interviews by adopting a natural dislike of her subject: the conversation is their opportunity to win her over.

At Storyful, we interrogate content shared on the social web in a style not dissimilar Barber’s grilling of dignitaries of media and politics. We adopt a natural skepticism to every item of content we discover. Verification is a cornerstone of our work and it has to be. Information and content often spreads across social media in ‘Chinese whispers’ fashion. Videos and images are spliced, diced and re-posted. Context and details change, agendas compete. Falsehoods and fabrications are deliberately issued.

Within an hour of the Pacific tsunami alert being issued on April 11, 2012, Twitter and YouTube abounded with videos purporting to show monster waves striking the coast of Sumatra and Aceh in Indonesia. However, these were versions of the devastating 2004 tsunami and other dramatic videos, reissued with the 2012 date. In December 2011, when a police officer was killed at Virginia Tech in the US, a picture of the 2007 massacre was widely circulated as the 2011 event. In both instances, Storyful was quickly able to debunk this content as false.

But how to verify what’s true? The challenge for news rooms in this new age of information overload is who and what to trust.

GET CLOSER TO THE SOURCE

From videos to 140-character tweets, we operate by the mantra that ‘there is always someone closer to the source’.

Often we are alerted to videos that are duplicated and reposted. Finding the original source is the first step in our verification process and it can require several techniques. Image technology allows us to find the first instance of video thumbnails and images. Examining data embedded within the image provides more information. And by identifying keywords to run through search engines, we often find the first upload of a video or image.

Once we find the source of an item of content, for instance a YouTube video, we appraise that source like traditional print and broadcast journalists would any person. We engage with them and we investigate their digital footprint. Some of the questions we ask are:

• Where is this account registered and where has the uploader been based, judging by their history?
• Are there other accounts – Twitter, Facebook, a blog or website – affiliated with this uploader? What information do they bear to indicate recent location, activity, reliability, bias, agenda?
• How long have these accounts been in existence? How active are they?
• Do they write in slang or dialect that is identifiable in the video’s narration?
• Can we find WHOIS information for an affiliated website?
• Is the person listed in local directories? Do their online social circles indicate they are close to this story/location?
• Does the uploader ‘scrape’ videos from news organisations and other YouTube accounts, or do they upload solely user-generated content?
• Are the videos on this account of a consistent quality?
• Are video descriptions consistent and mostly from a specific location? Are they dated? Do they have file extensions such as .AVI or .MP4 in the video title?
• Are we familiar with this account – has their content and reportage been reliable in the past?

Answering several of these questions gives us an impression as to the reliability of a source of content.

Example 1: Aceh residents evacuate on tsunami alert

For instance, when this video was posted to YouTube purporting to show residents of coastal Meulaboh, Aceh fleeing when the April 11 tsunami alert was issued, we could establish the following details about the uploader:

• The YouTube account listed Meulaboh as his hometown
• Several videos from Meulaboh were uploaded to the account in the six months before April 11
• The first tweet of this YouTube video was issued by an affiliated Twitter account, also based in Meulaboh, Aceh
• The Twitter user was actively tweeting from there in the weeks preceding the earthquake
• The uploader’s blog reported from the area
• We could establish a valid email address and two Indonesian telephone numbers for the uploader
• Additional sources in the area reported that people were evacuating
• A shop awning fluttering in a corner of the video reads ‘Meulaboh Lagoon’

Example 2: Sarah Churman hears her voice for first time

One of the most compelling videos of 2011 shared on YouTube was this one of Sarah Churman hearing her voice for the first time. It has over 12 million views on YouTube at the time of writing. Some local news outlets in Texas had discovered the video a couple of hours before we began our verification process. They incorrectly named Sarah as Sloan Churman (the name on the YouTube Channel). In applying our verification, we discovered:

• A previous video on the same YouTube account made reference to an Olivia
• This Texan memorial page remembers Ross Churman who is survived by son Sloan and Sarah Churman, and grand daughter Olivia
• WhitePages.com lists Sloan and Sarah Churman as associated people at an address in Burleson, Texas
• Sarah Churman’s blog, in which she wrote a post on the experience, beginning: “Well, got my implant activated today! I’ve been nervous for days. Couldn’t sleep last night.”

By applying verification to the video, we established not only its veracity, but the correct name for the subject and layers of context around Sarah’s powerful story. We were able to contact Sarah and Sloan and put our news partners in the US in touch with them.

CORROBORATE THE CONTENT

Once we have assessed an uploader, we focus on the content itself. Again, we ask the obvious questions – does the video make sense given the context in which it was filmed? Does anything jar with our journalistic instinct? Does anything look out of place, do clues suggest it is not legitimate? And we always look beyond the immediate to background detail:

• Can we geo-locate this footage? Are there any landmarks or topographical details that allow us to verify the location via Google Maps or Wikimapia?
• Do streetscapes tally with geo-located photos on Panoramio or Google Streetview?
• Do weather conditions tally with reports on that day?
• Do shadows tally with the time of day that this event reportedly happened?
• Do vehicle registration plates, signs or shopfronts indicate the country or state?
• Do accents or dialects heard in a video indicate the location?
• Does it tally with other videos/images people are uploading from this location?
• Does the video tally with events being reported (through Storyful’s curated Twitter lists, news wires and local news reports)?
• What does the community we engage with say about this video?
• If the video contains dialogue, do the accents or dialects fit the circumstances it purports to represent?
• What additional information does the Storyful team have on it?

Example 3: Syrian forces enter Darkoush, Idlib on March 7

When our curated Twitter list was reporting that Syrian security forces were spreading into the Idlib province in early March, we discovered this video of armed forces reportedly driving through remote Darkoush.

The account was unfamiliar to us and we established the following:

• The YouTube account had uploaded several videos described as Darkoush in recent times.
• The videos depicted the same area. Rugged hillsides are visible in the backdrop beyond a long main street
• A distinctive corner mosque with a nearby Cypress tree is visible in this video at 25 seconds in, and in other video posted by the uploader

These details tallied with the satellite map below of Darkoush showing rugged hills.

View Larger Map
Zooming in on this map, a the shadow of a minaret and a Cypress tree in corresponding proximity was visible at a corner along the main street:

In addition, the YouTube handle for this account is DarkoushRevo, suggesting that the account is primarily concerned with Darkoush. And the account is affiliated to Twitter and Facebook pages named Darkoush News.

These and other details reported from the area on the date give an indication as to its credibility.

Example 4: The killing of Shahid Nazir in Daraa, Syria

Some of the content in this post is too graphic to embed here, but interested readers can see how we applied verification to establish what happened to Shahid, a young Syrian man who went missing during the Saida massacre, near Daraa on April 29, 2011. Our starting point was an isolated video with scant detail, uploaded months after the event to a YouTube account based in northern Syria (the events were depicted as happening in the south).  The process involved taking atoms of information from this ‘scraped’ video, and running searches on the place names listed and on the date reported. Our verification of the deceased led us to verified video of his funeral in his home town, and a tribute video a neighbour who was buried with him on the same date.  Maps located his hometown within miles of Saida. His state of decay gave us a timeframe from his reported disappearance and his funeral. We discovered reports on the Saida massacre by Human Rights Watch and the Local Coordinating Committee in Syria providing context. We had documented video of these shootings at the time in our archive on StoryfulPro, providing further evidence and context.

At Storyful we are keenly aware of our responsibility to establish the facts. It’s a responsibility to news clients, to readers and viewers, to those involved in the videos we see and to the wider story. The techniques outlined above allow us to scrutinise sources and items of content, discover new elements, and to get to the heart of a story.

Storyful, a startup with staff based in Ireland, the UK, the US and Hong Kong is looking for a technical sales engineer. This person will assist our business team in selling customised projects based on the
Storyful social news platform. Our clients include YouTube, The New York Times, ABC News and The Economist Media lab.

You will work with the sales and engineering teams to create the most efficient solutions for major news clients. You will be coding but also meeting clients, estimating projects and pitching with the sales team.

Requirements:

• Able to work in New York, USA.
• Experience in requirements gathering and time estimation.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Thorough understanding of how the web works from URLs to HTTP,
  websites to webservices, HTML, CSS to JavaScript.
• Working knowledge of a server side language, preferably Ruby (and
  Rails) but PHP, Java etc. accepted.
• Working knowledge of XML, RSS and JSON.
• Able to travel internationally, including Dublin, Ireland for extended periods.
• Working in a client-facing role.

Highly desirable:

• Ability to rapidly mock up and prototype solutions.
• Sales experience.
• Experience integrating partner systems.
• Knowledge and contacts in the internet industry.
• Experience working with an international team.

Base Location: New York, USA.

If you think this sounds like a job for you, please e-mail join@storyful.com.

It’s been six weeks since I joined Storyful, and what has been most striking to me, is that even as someone who was a huge fan of Storyful and followed everything they did, I probably knew only a quarter of what they were up to!

So we’ve decided to publish a series of blog posts written by the individual members of the team, from our journalists who have experience working for some of the world’s most established newspapers and broadcasters, to our technology team who are developing big exciting Storyful products, as well as everyday tools and solutions for the team. Everyone has suggested a topic they want to write about, inspired by what they do at Storyful.

We will post at least twice a week for the next few months, and we hope to start conversations about verification; the trauma related to watching graphic youtube images every day; the ways in which technology must fit within a news organisation today; the role of ‘good’ news stories; the need for smart design in providing the best user experience; the opportunities and challenges created by increasingly vocal activist groups; and the balancing act required in terms of empowering voices in countries with internet censorship along with the need for protecting sources.

We hope it will help people get to know the Storyful team in a way that our individual profile pages on the website can’t. And also provide a series of thought-provoking posts on subjects close to everyone here at Storyful.

Please let us know if you would like to know more about any element of what we do and please comment on the posts. There are so many individuals passionate about social journalism, and doing similar work to ours. We’d love to develop that community so we can collectively consider topics such as verification, discovery and the issue of trauma related to looking at graphic imagery. We’ve talked to people at the BBC, Associated Press, Demotix and Global Voices – many agree it’s time the subject was considered more rigorously.

The first post will be published tomorrow and was written by our News Editor Malachy Browne. It explains in minute detail the verification processes used by the team on recent stories. It will be invaluable for journalists working on verifying online content, but also for journalism educators looking for concrete case studies to use in the classroom. I might be slightly biased but I read it last night and it’s a humdinger.

Bonus link: Our staff were interviewed for Irish radio last week, giving an audio peek inside Storyful. Here it is:

If you’re one of the hundreds of people who have asked about the Storyful app over recent weeks and months – we’d like to thank you for your input, enthusiasm and patience. We’re delighted to tell you the Storyful app is now in the iTunes app store.

Download the app to read the latest Storyful.com stories on your iPhone, browse our news archive by tag, or follow breaking news on our curated lists.

If you’re a StoryfulPro professional news customer, you can also sign in with your account details and use the recent tags to browse the most recent verified StoryfulPro video content and associated contacts and context.

Want to send us your own news video so that we can promote it to our global media partners? There’s already a separate app for that – the Storyful Direct app.

But there’s more. Storyful readers are a disparate bunch, and we want to make sure that we accommodate everyone, whether they read the news on their phone or at their desk, via Facebook, app, RSS reader, or now a simple, straight-forward email digest.

If you live by the contents of your email inbox, you can find Storyful there too. The new Storyful Daily email digest brings you everything the Storyful team has distilled from the social web for the last 24 hours, in whatever email format makes sense for how you consume your news. Sign up for free today.

Storyful. Helping you sift the news from the noise, whatever way works best for you.

We’ve created a Storyful Delicious account so we can start saving the links we’re reading and using every day. I’m personally a big fan of the new Stacks feature as it allows you to do more with your links. As someone once said, Delicious is the place you send links to die. True. It was always very tempting to save things to Delicious and never go back. But with stacks you can curate links and add quite lengthy comments to explain the context around why you chose the link and add extra background.

As a starter we’ve created three Stacks. One is a simple list of the best blogs about journalism, social media and technology. We have included 12 links, but would love to hear any suggestions for ones we have missed. We’re acutely aware that there is a real bias towards the UK and the US and would love to hear about blogs from other parts of the world. There’s such innovation happening in Sweden, Spain, India and Brazil but the case studies rarely get shared, often because of the obvious language barriers. We’d rather collect the definitive list of the best blogs discussing future directions for journalism, and it’s up to the reader to turn on Google translate, or take an evening class or two.

We also created a Stack with the best tools for social journalism. Most of them are included because they make newsgathering easier (Bambuser, Bottlenose,  Soundcloud, Trendsmap) but some of them are also incredible tools for sharing and pushing out content (Storify, Timeline, DocumentCloud). Again, we’d love to hear which tools people can’t live without, or maybe different types of uses or case studies for when these tools helped you find a great story, or helped you publish or broadcast news when other systems let you down.

Finally, we created a list of our favourite examples of collaborative journalism. Interestingly, it’s been the most clicked of the three stacks by quite some way. While there are some recent examples of impressive collaborative projects, many of them are actually relatively old, from 2009 or 2010. It made us wonder why that is. It feels as if pioneers in this space really saw the benefits of collaborative journalism, but as social tools such as twitter and facebook have been adopted in more newsrooms, they are just being used to ‘broadcast’ key messages from within the organisation, and the true value of social media, the dialogue with the audience has been lost. Please prove us wrong by sending as many examples of as many collaborative projects as possible. The more the merrier.

You may have noticed that Storyful has been pretty busy of late. This week we’re unveiling a new Storyful.com, delivering a fresh brand of social journalism that is easy to use and, we hope, easy on the eye. We’ve also made it easier to understand the relationship between Storyful’s open platform and the business model which supports it.

Storyful is the first newswire of the social media age, helping users separate the news from the noise. Our premium product, StoryfulPro, gives journalists the ability to find the most authentic voices and valuable content on the social web. On our public site Storyful.com, we develop the stories which resonate with us, blending real-time content with context and narrative.

On the new Storyful.com, we have given you the option of consuming the core elements of our stories – the ‘atoms’ which define it – by scrolling horizontally through them at the top of each story . Alternatively, you can scroll down, where those pieces are drawn together in more depth by our journalists in a more traditional narrative.

We really want your feedback to these changes to our platform. We’re always looking for partners willing to test, critique and challenge us as we develop new technical solutions to the problems facing journalists in the social age. Our ever-expanding team of designers and engineers is working on a set of curation tools which we hope will become standard in every social newsroom. As we roll out these tools in the coming months, we will be listening very hard to the opinions of our friends.

Storyful works in partnership with other journalists, not in competition. Our aim is to help news professionals who want to embrace the unfolding revolution in social news gathering.
The Storyful team has learned much from the work it does with innovative media organisations such as YouTube, ABC, The New York Times, the Economist Group Media Lab, ABC Australia and France24.

Our team is working flat out to build the most open and collaborative news ecosystem on the web. Our journalists scour the social web looking for the most authentic sources and helping them connect to a wider audience.

We operate on the assumption there is always someone closer to the story, and often that person is not a traditional reporter. Storyful wants to be a place where storytellers feel valued, whether they are activists, experts, humanitarians or independent journalists.

Every day we want to bring you beyond the traditional news agenda. We believe that every news event creates a community on the social web. We want to be the platform where these communities find a much wider audience.

These are big ambitions. We know that. But Storyful believes there has never been a better time to be ambitious about journalism.