At media pioneer Storyful, founded by former RTÉ journalist Mark Little in 2010, Shane Creevy is responsible for overseeing the discovery, verification and acquisition of the top video content shared via online channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all around the world.
“We help make news from noise,” Shane said. “When Storyful was set up, social media was exploding with hours of video uploaded every minute. That video, to be useful, needs to be verified, and someone with journalistic sense needs to make sense of it. My job is to discover meaningful, useful content, verify the video and the source, and then acquire the rights to use that content.”
To do this, Shane oversees teams in Dublin, Hong Kong, Sydney and New York. Storyful’s clients include the most influential media outlets around the globe. “The biggest newsrooms in the world rely on us. For them, with Storyful they get another newsroom within their newsroom.”
Storyful became a household name during the Arab Spring, bringing stories from the most remote parts of the world to a global audience. He recalls seeing “bubbling numbers of video and posts around Mid-East/North Africa which turned out to be from a town in Tunisia called Sidi Bouzid. I dug deeper and started seeing video and pieced together what was happening. A man who sold fruit and veg had set himself on fire in protest over actions by a police officer. It seemed small at first, but we got deeper into the story as it spread. Every Friday we knew would be a busy day as Muslims left their place of worship and gathered on the streets for more protest. We were watching a revolution unfold before our eyes.”
As unrest developed in Egypt, the company started working with YouTube to document the avalanche of videos being uploaded to the platform by eyewitness citizens - ordinary people at the centre of an historic event, armed with phones and 3G. By the US election in 2012, Barack Obama’s ground-breaking use of social media as a campaign tool sparked new needs and uses of digital content. Today, the latest trend is more complex. “We’re looking at fake news and thinking about how we can help, and help the social media platforms. How do you put the cork back in? That’s the question.”
Shane, originally from Wexford, says his education at Maynooth had a major influence on his career to date. “In secondary school in Ireland, you don’t get an opportunity to study philosophy. Maynooth gave me that opportunity.” Shane also took part in the Summer Programme for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) at Maynooth, conducting research with Professor Chris Morash on his book, A History of the Media in Ireland. He also worked with Prof. Colin Graham and Dr.Tom Hubbard on a bibliography of 20th century Irish literary criticism.
“That process of doing actual research---collecting artefacts, maps and getting out and about—got me thinking about journalism and talking to people.”
“You don’t always know how something you’re learning will turn out to be an asset later on,” Shane said. “How your brain is formed and changed in college and the transferrable skills you pick up all are helpful.”
The social aspect of Maynooth also left its mark. “Friends I met opened up intellectual areas of my world. At Maynooth I was constantly learning and bouncing off other people. It brings you that much further along.”
After his Master’s, Shane hooked up with Malachy Browne, Vincent Browne’s nephew, at Politico.ie, where he learned the journalism basics. Then, with a healthy dose of blind ambition, Shane reached out to Little blindly in 2010, “who was good enough to respond.” A year later, Shane was at Storyful, and a few years later, according to a post from Little on Shane’s LinkedIn page: “Shane would go on to be an absolutely critical part of the success of Storyful.”
Shane’s Maynooth connection extends to his personal life. Shane’s wife Ciara (Brennan) Creevy is a 2008 Maynooth alumnus who studied Psychology and now teaches primary school.