Storify

» see storify.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

storify was the kind of thing newsroom journalists used. you searched twitter, instagram, facebook, and a few other feeds, dragged the posts you wanted into a column, added some prose between them, and got back a single embeddable narrative the desk could drop into a liveblog. it was a glue product, and for most of the 2010s it was the glue.

burt herman and xavier damman started it in 2010 after herman left the associated press. by 2013 livefyre had bought it, and in 2016 adobe bought livefyre. each acquisition pushed storify further into the enterprise stack and further from the journalism school students it was built for. adobe gave the free version about two years before deciding the consumer service did not fit.

storify was a tool i never had a use for. liveblogging an election, a meeting, a court ruling was not part of what i was doing during its peak. it sat on the journalism side of the internet, and the journalism side of the internet was the side i read but did not work in.

~ the case file ~

~ the day it died ~

adobe announced the shutdown in december 2017. free accounts had until may 16, 2018 to export their stories as html or pdf. enterprise storify 2 customers got slightly longer. when the date arrived, every storify embed on the web turned into a dead box, every story link became a 404, and the journalism schools that had spent years teaching the tool had to update their syllabi.

~ the long tail ~

wakelet, a uk product that had been doing a similar collect-the-links job since 2016, absorbed the migration. several of the bigger news outlets had already stopped using storify by the time the shutdown landed, having noticed that twitter itself was changing in ways that made the format harder to defend. the linkrot is the real legacy. a liveblog of a 2014 protest, a teach-in on a 2015 policy debate, an embedded thread on a 2016 election night, all of them held together by storify, none of them resolving when you click the link today.

~ what carried over ~

the practice of "writing with the social web" persisted. the tool for doing it cleanly did not. wakelet exists. twitter as a verb does not, really. the storify shutdown was a small lesson, taught quietly, about hosting your own embeds.

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