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Storyzy: monetize your content archive by re-using quotes

A French startup raised an impressive $820,000 via crowd funding to launch a “search engine for quotes”. The system turns archives into searchable databases to extract quotes which can be added to today’s news stories to boost traffic and add context.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | September 16, 2016

Storyzy emerges at a time when news organisations are thinking of new ways to capitalise on content that is already at their disposal.

After the New York Times’ venture into delivering meal plans based on their recipes, and the French Paris Match’ monetizes its world-class photography, publishers can now join this trend by monetizing their own archive by repurposing previously produced quotes.

“Storyzy is a new way to consume the news through those who make the news. With this fundraising, we now have the means to commercialise a new functionality worldwide to enrich the content of major news sites in English. Storyzy drives revenues by monetizing archives and increasing the number of clicks,” explains Stan Motte, Storyzy’s CEO and Co-Founder.

How does it work?
Rather than rummaging all over the Internet, or spitting through their own CMS, the technology allows journalists to easily find “who said what” on a specific topic. “We focus on quotes rather than headlines because they add more value,” Pierre-Albert Ruquier, Chief Marketing Officer of Storyzy, told the World Editors Forum.

For example, if a journalist is working on a story about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the search results from Storyzy would be twofold: things Trump said about Putin directly, and also commentary from other people.



Extracting these quotes and adding them to stories can boost traffic by attracting more readers and/or keeping them longer on the publication’s own pages. It also adds editorial value by putting stories into context and has the potential to improve newsroom workflow for journalists on a deadline, by making it easier to find sources.

“For journalists to be able to easily search quotes enables them to make connections with things that happened before,” Ruquier said.

Once the quotes are selected, they are generated into “quote cards”, these are customizable widgets that can be embedded into stories with or without an image, headline, borders and lines, call to action, search bar, and more.

Search engines (especially Google) pick up on these widgets, improving the SEO of the page.

Building the Storyzy archive
The system draws from the entire Storyzy archive, currently made up of approximately 4,000 sources based on RSS feeds. Journalists can also select to feed exclusively from their own archive. Having launched only in August, the startup aims to get clients on board so that they can continue to receive feedback, improve user experience, track metrics, and improve accuracy.

The sophisticated technology, that took three years to build, uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to convert text into data. It includes both direct and indirectly quoted speech, speakers, photos of the speaker when available, story headlines, story summaries, companies involved and their logos when available, related links, and more.

When publishers sign up, Storyzy will turn their news archive into a searchable database. The tool can also be embedded into a newsroom’s own CMS to make day-to-day newsroom quote gathering much easier.

Written by Ingrid Cobben and Ko Bragg

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