Storify, a news start-up co-founded by 2009 Knight Fellow Burt Herman, is this year's $10,000 Grand Prize winner in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

Storify is a social media publishing platform that allows users to drag and drop elements from social networks such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube to create stories. Herman, a former Associated Press correspondent, and developer Xavier Damman launched Storify last year.

“In Storify, we see a journalism tool that truly solves a newsroom problem and also inspires others to challenge the way they've been telling stories,” Knight-Batten judge Amy Webb said in a press release.

J-Lab Director Jan Schaffer noted that several of this year's other competitors used Storify in their entries. “Scarcely a year into its existence, Storify has become so essential the word storify has become a verb,” she said.

Four other projects using social media, data and open-source software won Special Distinction prizes and four were named honorable mentions. (The press release with a list of winners is here.)

In February, Storify, which is based in San Francisco, received $2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. And a month later, Storify won the news category at SXSW Accelerator.

Herman began working on the idea during his year at Stanford. A few months after the end of his fellowship, he took a leave from the AP to pursue the project full-time and shortly after returning to the Bay Area, he met Damman, who was pursuing similar ideas, at a tech meet-up.

Storify has been used by numerous media outlets, including NPR, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, the Guardian and PBS,  and prominent bloggers.

 

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