Storify

The tool newsrooms used to turn tweets into stories, bought twice and closed by Adobe in 2018, taking thousands of embedded stories with it

Shut down
19902026

Storify was a web tool that let anyone build a story out of tweets, photos, videos and posts by dragging them into a timeline, then embed the result in an article. Launched in beta in September 2010 by Burt Herman and Xavier Damman, it became standard newsroom equipment for live events. Livefyre bought it in 2013, Adobe bought Livefyre in 2016, and storify.com closed on 16 May 2018.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2010
  2. September 2010 Launch
    Storify opens in private beta

    Drag posts into a timeline, publish, embed.

  3. 2011
  4. April 2011 Feature
    Public launch

    Open to anyone.

  5. 2013
  6. September 2013 Acquisition
    Livefyre buys Storify
  7. 2016
  8. May 2016 Acquisition
    Adobe buys Livefyre, and Storify with it
  9. 2017
  10. 12 December 2017 Shutdown announced
    Adobe announces the closure

    No new accounts from December 2017.

  11. 2018
  12. 1 May 2018 Decline
    Story creation switched off
  13. 16 May 2018 Shutdown
    storify.com shuts down

    5pm Pacific time.

The site through time

Browse storify.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Storify, Inc. 2010–2013 Founded Founded by Burt Herman and Xavier Damman
Livefyre 2013–2016 Acquisition Curation and comment platform for brands
Adobe 2016–2018 Acquisition Arrived with the Livefyre purchase, folded into Experience Manager

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Adobe, which had inherited Storify when it bought Livefyre in 2016, announced on 12 December 2017 that the free service would close. New accounts stopped that month, new stories could not be created after 1 May 2018, and storify.com shut down at 5pm Pacific time on 16 May 2018. A paid version, Storify 2, survived for Livefyre licence holders and was itself retired in 2019.

Our analysis: Storify solved a real problem for journalists, and it solved it for free, which meant it was always going to end up owned by somebody selling something else. Livefyre wanted the curation engine for brands, and Adobe wanted Livefyre for its marketing cloud; neither wanted a free tool for reporters. The damage was not the closure but the embeds: newsrooms had pasted Storify stories into thousands of articles, and when the service went dark those articles were left with holes where the reporting used to be.

History [edit]

Drag a tweet into a story

Storify came out of a private beta in September 2010, built by Burt Herman, a former Associated Press correspondent, and Xavier Damman. It did one thing well: you searched Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr or the open web in one pane, dragged the posts you wanted into a second pane, wrote connecting text between them, and published a story that could then be embedded anywhere.

For newsrooms covering live events, that was exactly the missing tool. The Arab Spring, hurricanes, elections, sport and the daily churn of things happening on Twitter all got Storified, by the BBC, the Washington Post, the Guardian and thousands of smaller outlets and teachers and researchers. It won a Knight News Challenge grant, raised venture funding, and by 2013 was reporting well over a million registered users.

Two acquisitions and a deadline

Livefyre, which sold comment and curation systems to brands, bought Storify in September 2013. Adobe bought Livefyre in May 2016 and folded it into Adobe Experience Manager. The free consumer tool sat inside an enterprise marketing stack, which is a place free consumer tools do not survive.

On 12 December 2017 Adobe posted the schedule: no new accounts from that month, no new stories after 1 May 2018, and the service off at 5pm Pacific on 16 May 2018. Users could export their stories as HTML, and archivists at the Internet Archive and elsewhere scrambled to save what they could, but every article on the web with a Storify embed in it lost its middle. Storify 2, the paid version for Livefyre customers, was retired the following year.

The domain today

storify.com no longer serves stories. The name has since been used by an unrelated news site, which is not connected to the original service.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Storify's standalone service is shutting down next year TechCrunch 12 December 2017 [archived]
  2. Storify to close May 16, 2018 WP Tavern 13 December 2017 [archived]
  3. Storify's demise shows nothing lasts forever Nieman Journalism Lab 13 December 2017 [archived]
  4. Storify Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]
  5. Livefyre Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).