START-UP NATION:The pace of breaking news on the likes of Twitter led former RTÉ journalist Mark Little to establish a new type of news agency, writes JOHN COLLINS
THERE WERE two watershed moments that convinced Mark Little to give up his job in RTÉ and create his own start-up, one professional and one personal.
Having covered Iran as a reporter, he was struck that the best reporting on the 2009 protests was not coming from traditional media sources but from 17-year-olds on the street with camera phones.
“That was a lightbulb moment. These kids were going to grow up expecting to be reporters. That’s a great opportunity but also a danger, because how do you know which reports can be trusted? Who was going to verify them?”
A couple of weeks later, Little was at a family wedding in Tipperary. Around 9.30pm, he noticed the younger people in the room huddled around smartphones. The news of Michael Jackson’s death was breaking on Twitter and by 10pm Little was dancing to Thriller with his mother. It was another 10 minutes before the Los Angeles Times became the first mainstream media outlet to confirm the death.
Although enjoying his work at RTÉ, where he presented Prime Time, he felt, having turned 40, it was time to do something for himself, and so Storyful was born.
Now employing 27 full-time staff, with plans to grow to 40 by the autumn, Storyful is a news agency based on social media.
“It’s what Associated Press would be if it was founded in the digital age,” says Little.
Although now backed by serial internet entrepreneur Ray Nolan, SOS Venture Capital partner Bill Liao and ACT Venture Capital, Little initially remortgaged his home and borrowed money to fund the company.
He won’t be drawn on exactly how much investment Storyful has raised, but says the company is financed for the next year.
“That will get the business to the stage where we are a global force,” he says.
Little left RTÉ in January 2010 to begin working on Storyful, although the first client, ABC News, did not sign on until December of that year and it was early 2011 before the business began to get “traction”, he says.
Customers now include ABC News in the US and Australia, Channel 4, France 24, Bloomberg and the Weather Channel.
Storyful’s biggest customer, however, is Google and its YouTube subsidiary. The most public fruit of that deal is the Google Politics Elections site where Storyful staff select videos from YouTube, such as user-generated content, attack ads, bloopers and other unexpected moments, and highlight them on the site.
While Storyful has a public facing site which highlights the social media take on the major news stories around the world, customers pay to access Storyful Pro. It provides a dashboard so journalists and editors can quickly see what is being said on social media by influential players and also what content is attracting a lot of attention.
Storyful verifies the content and, where possible, gets clearance from the creator so the news organisation can use the videos, pictures or text in their own output. In fact, a significant proportion of Storyful’s time is now spent warning its customers about hoax videos and other stories circulating online.
The Pro product is also customised for the interests of the individual news organisation
Although currently designed for large news organisations, Little says the company is working on version 2.0 of Storyful Pro which he hopes “will appeal to thousands of newsrooms, not just the big ones”.
The challenge for Storyful has been the transition from being a media company to becoming more a technology company. Little estimates that 60-70 per cent of content it highlights is found using its in-house technology, but he would like that to increase to 90-95 per cent.
“There will always be a human element because people in the media business don’t want to trust a machine,” says Little. “They want to deal with people like them.”
While Twitter is usually the “first stop” with regards to breaking news, Little says it is just “the door to a story”.
“Every news event creates an online community which you can find on Facebook and YouTube, but increasingly new platforms like Soundcloud are important as well,” says Little.
While he has enjoyed the transition from “old media” to running his own start-up, he admits it has been difficult. As a journalist, his default position was to be “paranoid” about everything, but in the start-up world you have to be open about everything.
And Little’s high profile since his days in RTÉ has not always been a help to the business. “I was told afterwards that one VC firm didn’t want to invest in what could potentially be a high-profile failure,” said Little.
