Last week we had the opportunity, for the first time, to sit down with a functioning, experienced newsroom to talk about how the StoryMaker app might help them.

By Brian Conley, Small World News

Last week we had the opportunity, for the first time, to sit down with a functioning, experienced newsroom to talk about how StoryMaker might help them.

When we started building StoryMaker three years ago, we envisioned not the tool for workshops and training that it has become. Steve and I imagined a tool to help citizen journalists and activists make better content and tell more compelling stories. Since then, a few projects have emerged that used StoryMaker itself as the main platform for telling stories, most notably Mobile Community Zimbabwe, about which we’ve written quite a lot.

We met with the editorial team of a news organization that focuses quite a lot on Iran to discuss StoryMaker. They were very interested in how the app could facilitate gathering better content from their audience. As part of this, we created a curriculum to support citizen journalists in Iran, ahead of the elections there next year.

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