As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media - and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify - thwarted the media blackout.

Saving The News

This is a new media age. The news of the Occupation has countless reporters, and some of the Web's best curators have taken on the task of weaving the Occupy stories together. In particular, Xeni Jardin has been a machine on Twitter, providing a one-woman breaking news channel of so many successive Occupy confrontations.

But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.

Storify's New Role: The Backbone of News

The world needed a shareable, embeddable way to gather the tweetstorm of breaking news and turn it into a lasting document. Storify has made that possible. After a closed beta period with professional journalists, Storify opened to the public in April.

In October, it rolled out a brand new editing interface making the tool vastly easier to use. And one week ago, just before the police raided Zuccotti Park, Storify made its move, redesigning its homepage as a destination featuring the most important stories on the social Web. Storify's vision is no less than a leveling of the media playing field. On the Storify homepage, lifelong and first-time journalists stand side by side.

"All news is social now," says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever's on the ground is the reporter, and whoever's curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn't matter who is whom. "We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources."

From a Dorm Room to the Front Page

While career journalists were being removed from Zuccotti Park, Ben Doernberg was watching the Web from his dorm room at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ben is a college junior, and journalism is not his major. But his Storify of the Occupy Wall Street raid reached tens of thousands of people and was embedded by the Washington Post.

"This is not actually my first Storify," he says, despite fun rumors to the contrary. "I was at Zuccotti Park about a month ago and happened to take a video that ended up getting on CNN, so this is kind of the second bizarre media day I've had in the last month."

Doernberg used Storify to track the reports of the media blackout. "I looked at Twitter around 1 o'clock, and everything was going insane," Doernberg says.

"By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time." What resulted was a comprehensive document of tweets, links, photos and videos of instances of the NYPD suppressing the media presence in Zuccotti Park. The Washington Post ran it, and the post has been viewed more than 20,000 times.

The 99% Media

The founders of Storify couldn't be more delighted that students are making headlines using their platform. The day after the raid on Zuccotti Park, Storify shared two student stories from the raid on its blog. Doernberg's was one. The other was by Columbia journalism grad student XinHui Lim, whose Storify post captured the grisly details from the ground and included embedded live-streamed video. At one point in the night, that amateur video stream had 23,000 viewers.

Damman says this is the perfect demonstration of the Storify redesign. These social media documents are the real story, and the NYPD's obstruction of credentialed journalists only shows how out of touch the police are. "The police in New York don't realize that it doesn't matter to not have journalists on the scene," Damman says, "because everybody is a reporter. What happened last night shows that they don't get that."

"Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%."

Herman agrees that Monday's events prove that the distinction between legacy media and new media is no longer important. During the raid, journalists became sources, regular people became journalists, and they traded places with each other throughout the night. It's all one medium now. "Let's not spite the Internet," Herman says. "Let's let the Internet be what it is."

The Gatekeepers

The NYPD's censorship efforts were thwarted by smartphones, Web technology and good, old-fashioned gumption. But authorities are working hard around the country to block journalists from covering the Occupation. Twenty six reporters have been arrested so far, ten of them in Zuccotti Park on Monday night.

Fortunately, those incidents are being captured on Storify, too, and the curator wants to make sure the free press is protected.

***Next page:** Josh Stearns of FreePress.net on new media, arrested journalists and the implications of the OWS blackout.*

Josh Stearns, Associate Program Director at Free Press, has been storifying journalist arrests at Occupy protests since September. He's using Storify as a living page, updating each time another journalist is arrested. You can help him by sending tips and tweets to @jcstearns.

Free Press is also holding a petition for their Save The News campaign urging New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to stop attacking freedom of the press.

Watching the Story Unfold

November 15 was a big night for journalist arrests, and Stearns was watching Twitter closely. "I think of Twitter as the place where I watch the story unfold," Stearns says, "but then I often look to a place like Storify or an article or liveblog where there's somebody intentionally trying to contextualize and weave things together."

One of the things Stearns struggled with during Monday's raids was "that reports were coming in at all different times. Trying to piece together when something happened" was a challenge, since both the events and tweets about the events were displaced in time.

"Twitter's so great for seeing the story unfold, but I think there's a lot of awesome work that can be done in contextualizing it." That's where Storify comes in. "I think Storify is a very flexible tool, being able to do that kind of rapid reporting or to bear witness over time."

Media Symbiosis

Stearns was impressed with Doernberg's work Monday night and how Storify enabled it. "His Storify wouldn't have been possible without people on the ground, and people on the ground weren't able to get their story out until his Storify collected those from all over the place and broadcasted it, and that story got into the Washington Post."

Storify provides the bridge between legacy and new media in situations like this. "I think there's really nice symbiosis between the two," Stearns says. "I think that's one thing Storify has done really well, positioning itself within a new media realm but making new media approachable for traditional organizations."

The Gatekeepers Are Changing

But legacy institutions aren't weathering the transition well. The Associated Press came down hard on its staff for tweeting too eagerly about their arrests in an email that feels awfully shy about new media participation. It warns AP reporters not to get "caught in the moment."

For Stearns, the important question is why. "The question becomes, were [the police] effective only to the point because they were only paying attention to one kind of media? And what was the intention behind that?"

"Why was there the decision to have a media blackout? Why were helicopters grounded? Why were journalists kept to the edges? If we ask those 'why' questions, and it turns out there was actual intentionality behind it, then that's profoundly troubling." If the police are really concerned about any message getting out at all, Stearns worries, they will learn to adapt to new media eventually.

Adapting To The New Reality

For some law enforcement agencies, that adaptation is already underway. "We've heard about Occupy protests around the country where they do strobe lights that actually blind camera phones and other kinds of cameras. Or things like the BART stations in San Francisco shutting down the cell networks when the protests come in."

Law enforcement isn't the only force that threatens freedom of the press. The technology companies who make the devices used by citizen journalists are a bottleneck for what kinds of reporting are possible. And many of the big ones have shown a disturbing willingness to comply with authorities.

"Whether it's Amazon taking down all of WikiLeaks that was stored on their cloud servers because Senator Joe Lieberman asked them to," Stearns recounts, "or whether it's Apple and their patent for the camera [that blocks recording in designated areas], or Verizon blocking NARAL text messages, regardless of what issue it is, as the platforms change, the gatekeepers are changing."

Taking Back The Media

Stearns sees hope in the way Storify and social media platforms have broken the police barricades around the media. "The one thing I think is really encouraging is that people are actually feeling ownership of their media," Stearns says. "People feel like, 'This is my phone. I'm creating my media on this.' People want to take back the media."

This is what the Storify founders have in mind. "This is a chance to create this whole new form of news," Herman says. Storify held a gathering called Occupy The News at its San Francisco headquarters on November 7, where career journalists from a range of publications came together to discuss the possibilities of new media. You can soak in their insights - where else - on Storify.

A tumultuous time like ours is ripe for a disruption of the ways in which we capture our stories and work toward the truth. The gatekeepers are changing, but the media are changing faster. There have never been more ways to experiment with information. Thanks to platforms like smartphones, Twitter and Storify, the barriers to participation are vanishing.

You can see all Storify posts about the Occupation on the occupy topic page.

Check out our guide on How To Curate Conversations With Storify.

Sign the petition to Save The News.

Have you ever used Storify? Share your posts in the comments.

The BreakingNews team manages a round-the-clock firehose of the day's biggest stories using a deft mix of automatic and manual curation tools. What results is a feed of the major headlines from around the world right as they happen. The full feeds are available on BreakingNews.com and mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7, while the Twitter feeds offer a tighter stream of the world's top stories.

"From the riots to the News of the World scandal, the U.K. has experienced a tremendous amount of breaking news this year," says Cory Bergman, director of BreakingNews. "Our London team will help strengthen BreakingNews' overall global coverage, including the European debt crisis and continuing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa."

BreakingNews watches the Twitter accounts of news organizations and whitelists the ones they find reliable. When those sources include #breaking or #breakingnews in a tweet, it tips off the BreakingNews editors. Over 160 organizations, including ABC News and Huffington Post, currently participate. Users of BreakingNews.com can also tip the editors by submitting links.

U.K. residents will find the BreakingNews widget on uk.msn.com, and you can follow the brand new @BreakingNewsUK Twitter account.

Do you follow @BreakingNews on Twitter?

Sometimes it's difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we thought it might be helpful to wrap up some of the most talked about stories. Assuming this goes over well, we're going to give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus as well. This is a new feature at ReadWriteWeb so we covet your feedback. If you have suggestions, please leave them in the comments below or reach out to me directly at robyn at readwriteweb.com.

The story about MongoDB, now thought to be a hoax, made it all around the web thanks to its popularity on Hacker News. Despite a fast response from the CTO and the disbelief of several commenters, it still spread like wildfire, causing our own Joe Brockmeier to wonder whether or not citizen curation of content is helpful or harmful (or six of one, half a dozen of the other). What do you think?

From the comments:

Here are a few more must read posts, chosen by your fellow community members.

• Yammer Widens Its Ecosystem Big Time

• [UPDATED] Facebook Restores the Old News Feed

• Infographic: Mobile Apps and Customer Engagement

• Poll: What Is Your Reaction to the Death of Mobile Flash?

• Ex-Flash Manager: Adobe Ignored Smartphones Until It Was Too Late

• Infographic: The Crowdfunding Landscape

• Google+ Badges Will Let Users Search For Your +Name

• WordPress.com Adds Photo Carousels, Goes Even More Social

• Bridge the Gap Between Live TV and Web Video With Boxee's Next Update

ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup

Have you claimed your place in our ReadWriteWeb Worldwide Meetup on November 15? Reach out to our community manager, Robyn Tippins, at robyn at readwriteweb.com if you have any questions.

The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.

Read All About It

The app comes in through the Newsstand feature of iOS 5. All its text and photo content are available offline, and related stories open in a browser view. Readers can swipe back and forth between stories instead of having to tap around through menus. The app offers story sharing through Facebook, Twitter and email.

"The Guardian iPad edition is a new, fresh and appealing form of our newspaper content," says editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. "The single daily download and the hierarchy of articles will suit people who love the Guardian's newspaper content. To that we've added a selection of relevant web articles."

Rusbridger says the app reflects the organization's digital-first strategy. That's a curious remark, considering that this iPad edition mirrors the print paper, but we'll let that one slide, because this app is a first-rate tablet experience.

The Guardian has also offered a free photo gallery app for iPad called Eyewitness, which launched in February.

The Guardian's Moves Across The Pond

Though this app centers around the U.K. edition of the paper, it has plenty to offer international readers. The Guardian has made it clear that it has international ambitions as a news organization, too. In September, it announced the launch of a U.S. homepage and declared that it was hiring U.S. journalists. It also offers a free U.S. version of its iPhone app.

As we reported yesterday, new studies show that tablet owners love consuming news on these new devices. The Guardian's new app is an excellent example of all the qualities highlighted by consumers in that study.

Take the Guardian iPad Edition for a spin and let us know what you think!

But the study also found that the benefits of tablets extend beyond news. Subjects reported a range of improvements tablets brought to their lives, and many of them were unexpected. The study broke down tablet owners based on how long they've had tablets and found that all of the positive effects increased over time. Tablets aren't a fad; they're fundamentally changing the way people use the Web.

The majority of tablet owners agree that these new devices "offer more than just portability and convenience," and that sentiment only increases over time. Roughly the same proportions use the tablet at home more than they anticipated. Only 48% of people who have owned a tablet for less than six months use it more than they expected to, but that proportion increases to 57% by the end of the first year.

It takes some time for people to get used to their tablet. Only 44% find that tablets are a seamless part of their lives in the first six months. But by the time they've owned a tablet for a year or more, nearly 70% feel that it's an integral part of their routine.

Another interesting finding was that tablet owners report increased efficiency more than they do "fun," which runs counter to the popular perception of tablets as unserious devices meant for play. While 62% reported that tablets let them do things more efficiently, 51% said their tablets let them have more fun. And 67% of the subjects said they were "excited to see what tablets become capable of," so the future of tablet computing looks bright from consumers' standpoint.

Tablets Whet News Consumers' Appetites

As far as the content consumed on tablets, the study concentrated on news, a media category that has a ways to go to recover from the disruptions of the digital age. It found that 78% of tablet owners follow more news stories, in terms of both volume and variety, than they did before.

Respondents reported that tablets substantially improved many aspects of the news experience. 81% reported that "tablets make following the news more interesting and enjoyable," and 78% felt that "tablets substantially improve the news experience overall."

Tablets Bring Immersion and Control

One of the strongest signals of what tablet owners like about the experience is the customization and control it offers. 85% of tablet owners find it easier to customize and interact with tablet-specific content.

Tablets Can Make Advertising Work

Control over the experience played into subjects' preferences for news content itself, but it even factored into the way they felt about advertising, that crucial element of the news business.

"The advertisements on my laptop just drive me nuts," says Mindy, one of the subjects. "On the tablet, I didn't have that experience."

"Maybe I wouldn't mind the ads so much if... it's leading to something relevant to me," adds Lauren, another subject, "but if there's something fun that I can do with an ad to personalize it and make it really fit [for] me, then it's something I might click on, and I might send it to my friends."

This video interview with Mindy and Lauren shows an example of an AdJitsu 3D mobile ad, which we reported on last week:

Methodology

The study was conducted by Latitude with a three-phase methodology:

The first phase consisted of exploratory, qualitative phone interviews with tablet owners and news consumers, looking for insights into the role of tablets in users' lives to direct the rest of the study.

Phase two involved a 20-minute online survey with n=1099 news consumers between the ages of 18 and 54, 88% of whom were current tablet owners. This phase also used interactive elements to capture reactions to ad campaigns and elicit insights about how to make tablets work best for consumers.

The final phase was a week-long immersion trial in which heavy tablet owners were deprived of their devices, and non-tablet owners were immersed in tablet content. These trials were followed by in-depth interviews in which subjects articulated the benefits and drawbacks of their experiences.

What do you think? Have tablets changed the way you browse? Share your thoughts in the comments.

News360 now personalizes the news using Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Evernote and Google Plus, providing a comprehensive picture of a user's interests. The developers found that the long, in-depth updates users post on Google Plus are rich in semantic data that can improve personalization. The personalization syncs between the tablet and the desktop Web version, but the mobile versions don't have it yet.

Rather than using social data to recommend stories just because your friends liked them, News360 creates a semantic map of what stories actually say, determining relevance to the user based on the content itself.

Flipboard also uses semantic data in this way, but it mainly presents content from feeds selected by the user. News360 is more analogous to Google News, except its personalization is much more closely tailored to the user's interest graphs, thanks to its integration with so many services.

After analyzing the services you add, News360 presents a list of topics based on the data it crawls. You can then manually remove topics or add more, and topics can be individually tweaked with more tags to make them more precise.

News360 pulls in stories from all over the Web, and it displays a preview of the story that comes highlighted with key terms, related photos, and coverage from other sources. Clicking to expand the preview takes the user to the original source page.

With the addition of Google Plus to the suite of crawled services, News360 now has access to a wealth of user conversations with a variety of audiences. There are so many services that recommend stories because your friends linked to them or liked them, but News360 is uniquely equipped to recommend them based on what they actually say.

Check out the free News360 app for all major device platforms, or try the Web version.

ABC's morning show Good Morning America has relaunched as a Yahoo site, and George Stephanopoulos will webcast an interview with President Obama on Yahoo and ABCNews.com today at 2:35 p.m. ET.

The announcement comes at an interesting moment for Yahoo. Last month, its board fired CEO Carol Bartz, naming Chief Financial Officer Timothy Morse as interim CEO. Yahoo and Microsoft's search partnership has not met either party's expectations, and Yahoo has lost a number of key executives in recent months.

Yahoo is still positioned as a media company, but it has struggled to find an identity, and analysts point out that media companies don't tend to do well with finance people at the helm. Jack Ma, CEO of Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, has expressed interest in buying Yahoo, which owns a partial stake in his company, but Yahoo has not announced anything specific about any mergers, acquisitions or a permanent CEO hiring.

Poynter points out that today's partnership looks remarkably like one announced in 2000 between the same two companies. The content looks different this time, but the arrangement is familiar. AdAge reports that former ABCNews.com manager Bernie Gershon said the past arrangement was "lucrative for both parties," but it lost steam due to editorial disagreements.

How do you think this deal will affect ABC and Yahoo? Let us know in the comments.

Once a few prominent blogs began reporting on it, the news spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook, where eager fans posted updates about the show and began making plans to attend.

By that point, the Internet-fueled rumor had found its way to the front pages of prominent blogs and music news sites like Gawker, Pitchfork, Gothamist and Huffington Post. Long after media outlets followed up and confirmed that the concert wasn't going to happen, several people on Twitter continued to chatter about it as though it was still on.

So how did this story morph from rumor into front page news so quickly?

Today's real-time, social media-fueled news cycle is partly to blame. So too, it would appear, is at least one spokesman for the Occupy Wall Street protest, who confirmed to reporters that the concert was on. The official website for the demonstration published a post at 12:13pm EST announcing that "Radiohead will play a surprise show for #occupywallstreet today at four in the afternoon." Even hours after the rumor had been denied by the band, the post was not updated or redacted.

As word about the concert began to spread on Twitter, people cited that post as an official confirmation of the show's existence. So too did bloggers, who began publishing the news, further propelling the social Web into a frenzy over the prospect of one of the world's most popular rock bands playing an impromptu gig for an anti-Wall Street protest. Over the course of several hours, Anonymous repeatedly tweeted that the show would be happening, and even offered up a link to a livestream the concert.

By 4:00pm Eastern Time, the concert had not begun, even as some fans speculated that the band had only denied it to prevent a massive crowd from forming. Hours after protestor organizers fanned the flames of the falsehood, a spokesman for the protest finally came forward and said that they'd been "hoaxed", confirming that the whole thing was fake.

If nothing else, the affair served as an illustration of how, despite being revolutionary in some ways, our hyper-rapid, Twitter-fueled news cycle can sometimes get facts wrong and help disseminate them regardless. It's not the first time it's happened, nor will it likely be the last.

Update: The Village Voice has published an email that was sent to the Occupy Wall Street organizers from somebody claiming to be one of Radiohead's managers. This phony email appears to be the spark that ignited yesterday's confusion.

Lead photo by Alterna2.

But just because this message flew by on Twitter, does that mean we should go into panic mode? The Onion is a satirical source. It produces works of fiction, and it tries to be funny. That's all it does. It can publish whatever it wants. One tweet is not an isolated incident. It's part of a stream of messages, and the rest of the messages here tell an obviously satirical story.

@TheOnion
The Onion

BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.

9/29/11

Certainly, that's not a very funny joke considered by itself. It was off-putting enough for Mathew Ingram to wonder whether the account had been compromised:

@mathewi
Mathew Ingram

uh-oh -- looks like @TheOnion might have been hacked -- via @mjenkins

9/29/11

But no, as it turned out, this was all part of the plan. They were promoting a story called Congress Takes Group Of Schoolchildren Hostage, and it's pretty much a run-of-the-mill Onion story, although it does name some congressional names. It's satire, though. It's The Onion. There's nothing beyond the pale.

@johnpaul
John Paul Titlow

You guys. It's The Onion.

9/29/11

It's readers' responsibility to know their sources. The Onion is a satirical publication, and it should be widely known. That does not stop people from believing Onion stories, as the amazing blog "Literally Unbelievable" can demonstrate, but that's not the Onion's fault. The Onion's job is to make up fake news stories. It's citizens' job to be informed enough to identify them.

We live in a panicked time, and that panic is compounded by the speed of social media. One could make abstruse fire-in-a-crowded-theater arguments about The Onion's responsibilities, but it is not, nor does it have the slightest desire to be, a credible source of information.

Ingram asked an interesting question in the wake of these tweets:

@mathewi
Mathew Ingram

could @TheOnion be at risk of legal action for tweeting about a non-existent attack on the Capitol building? just curious

9/29/11

If so, we should think twice, maybe even several times, about whether that action would be deserved.

When H.G. Wells Orson Welles did his War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, people actually sued the network for "mental anguish and personal injury." Did they deserve compensation? (edit: thanks very much for the correction, codeslave)

Jesse Logterman had an interesting take in response to Andy Carvin's discussion of the whole thing:

@ozonejl
Jesse Logterman

@acarvin If you take The Onion seriously or don't know what it is and don't double check, you deserve your panic. Sick of paranoia culture.

9/29/11

The first tweet sucked. I think we can all agree on that. The whole story might be utterly devoid of humor. But The Onion can say literally whatever it wants. Its job is to be funny. If it fails at that job, what is our loss?

@xenijardin
Xeni Jardin

I AM READY TO MOVE ON FROM THE ONION TRAGEDY NOW. THANK YOU EVERYONE.

9/29/11

As sci-fi as it may sound, that's exactly what researcher Kalev Leetaru was able to accomplish with a little help from SGI's Altix UV supercomputer packing 8.2 teraflops of processing power. Leetaru, a digital media analytics expert at the University of Illinois, wrote software that can scan over 100 million news articles and uses sentiment analysis, text geocoding and predictive analytics to determine when political upheaval will go from rowdy to revolutionary.

Well sure, you might say, wasn't it obvious that the Egyptian revolution was coming to anybody following current events? In early 2011, perhaps it was. What this software was able to pinpoint was a an increase in negative tone during the entire decade that preceded these revolutions.

Writes Peter Murray on the Singularity Hub:

Tone monitoring was performed on 52,438 articles worldwide between January 1979 and March 2011 that contained any mention of an Egyptian city. The software selected for Egyptian cities rather than the word "Egypt" to filter out articles that only casually mentioned Egypt the way a travel guide might do. Between January 1 and January 24 of 2011, global tone about Egypt dropped to an extent that had only been seen twice in the past 30 years.

This is Culturnomics at work. One of the more well-known applications of it would be the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a Google Labs project that scans 15 million digitized books to reveal the frequency of certain words and phrases over time. By applying a similar methodology to news articles, researchers can gain insight into human society on an even bigger scale and in a more real-time fashion.

"A growing body of work has shown that measuring the 'tone' of this real-time consciousness can accurately forecast many broad social behaviors, ranging from box office sales to the stock market itself," Leetaru writes in the introduction to his recent study on how the tone of news global news coverage can be used to predict events.

"Despite being hailed as a social media revolution, monitoring the tone of only mainstream media around the world would have been enough to suggest the potential for unrest in Egypt," continues Leetaru.

The academic paper, which is well worth at least a skim for those interested in this topic, goes into detail about how this method can be applied to retroactively foresee turmoil in the Middle East and the Balkans and even allegedly narrow down the location of Osama Bin Laden's hideout, at least within a range of 200 kilometers.

Of course, this is a relatively new area of study and the methodology has yet to be used to actually predict future events. Either way, there's no doubt that we stand to gain substantial new insights when the real-time, Web-based dissemination of news meets large-scale sentiment analysis.