Storyful begins with a wedding and a revolution. The Green Revolution in Iran in June 2009 transformed my understanding of journalism. Every young phone-wielding protester on the streets of Tehran had the power to reach the world, without the help of traditional foreign correspondents like me.
A few weeks after the Iran protests, on the night of my cousin’s wedding, Twitter broke the news of the death of Michael Jackson to the world. Guests at that Irish wedding were shuffling on the dancefloor to Thriller long before the LA Times had broken news of Jackson’s death.
But when everybody can share the world’s stories, how do you find the voices worth listening to? That question, and those two events, would lead me to found the world’s first social media agency, Storyful.
In no time at all, our small Irish start-up was partnered with global media companies and technology platforms like YouTube, helping pioneer a brand-new form of open-source journalism.
I get a lump in my throat every time I watch this video. Produced by the Google News team in 2015, it tracks a day in the life of the Storyful team:
During the most intense fighting of the Syrian civil war, the Storyful team discovered a YouTube video shot with a GoPro camera mounted on a government tank trundling through the devastated Damascus suburb of Daraya. As the convoy stops, the lead vehicle explodes in a ball of flames.
In any previous conflict, this moment of violence would have lived on its own, within a single fixed perspective. But Storyful curators had been monitoring the YouTube channel of a local rebel force, the Almekdad Battalion, where we found footage of a militia man firing his Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade at the government tank we had just seen explode.
Here how we presented that schizophrenic experience to a gathering of news executives.
One of Storyful’s most talented leaders was Markham Nolan. Here’s his brilliant TEDtalk about how he and the Storyful team help pioneer a new form of journalism with the people formerly known as the audience: