Update: Storify has been discontinued.
If you work in a newsroom that does breaking news, you’ve got to have a plan for covering news when it breaks. Here are four tools to consider:
Cover It Live is the reigning champ in this space. It has a few issues, though. One is that it only makes sense for sites with a lot of traffic it’s just not that practical, cost-wise, for a smaller site. And while it works great for certain causes SCOTUSblog has used it with great success the real issue is that people can’t share what’s being said in Cover It Live.
And these days, if people can’t share the news you’re reporting, that’s a huge issue.
There’s Storify, which is great for after-the-event coverage. If you’re looking to compile a giant story about what just happened, Storify is fantastic. It can pull in content from all of the big social media sites, and your final stories are easy to embed elsewhere. But it isn’t designed for news events that are in progress.
The new entry in the game is called BeatStrap, and for a product in beta, it’s got some promise. It’s all run through Twitter, so it takes only a few seconds to get started. You specify which Twitter accounts you want it to pull in tweets from, and it’ll grab every tweet that has a pre-specified hashtag. You can embed the tweets on your own site, which is essential. You can also retweet and reply to tweets directly from the BeatStrap live blog box a huge bonus.
But right now, a live blog can only feature up to three Twitter accounts. And the live blog doesn’t auto-update. (If they fix those two things, though, it could be a real contender. It’s really easy to use.)
So what’s the best option for covering breaking news?
I think it’s still Twitter. It’s SO easy to publish on Twitter, and it’s really easy for your readers to share what you’re saying with the rest of the world.
I really like when newsrooms run separate accounts for regular news and breaking news. The main account should be the face of the newsroom like @nytimes or @BuzzFeed or @CNN, showing off the full spectrum of stories/personality at your news organization. Then there should be a second account the NYT has @thelede, BuzzFeed’s got @BuzzFeedNews, CNN has @cnnbrk dedicated specifically to hard news. (If you’ve only got the one account, your followers tend to get overwhelmed with lots of breaking news tweets and unfollow you during big news events.)
And when it’s all over, you can always Storify the reporting that’s already been done.
Now get out there and tell some great stories today!