Burt Herman of Storify chats with Wamda at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit about how he was inspired to build the social news curation platform after spending 12 years in the field as a journalist around the globe.

When it comes to the need for social media curation, "400 million tweets are sent everyday, YouTube has 72 hours of video uploaded every minute, Facebook has 3 million photos shared a day, he says. "We're empowering all of these people to publish, but where do we go from there? How do we take it to the next level to actually find all of the stuff that matters to you?" 

That's the central premise of Storify- you can build stories, pulling in elements from social media and around the web, and then publish it as a story that can be embedded on other sites. This last element was crucial for spreading Storify, confesses Herman- "we still get more traffic on other websites than we do on our own website." confesses. He explains why it was important for their platform to leverage social media on both sides, allowing users to push curated stories back out to social media from Storify.  

It's the perfect time for a new media startup to approach more traditional outlets in partnership, he says. "We're in this time where people are figuring out what the future of media will be, and everybody is actually really open to trying lots of things, and for startups, that's also a great opportunity to work with these big companies and get more distribution than you could on your own."

Herman also touches upon ways the platform will be monetizing, and mentions the creation of Hacks/Hackers, a meetup group for journalists and technologists that now has a chapter in Amman.

[Apologies for the poor framing in parts, this was a mistake].