Excuse Our Ignorance

BuzzFeed is an online news and entertainment website with editions worldwide. The website publishes daily content including breaking news, current topical affairs as well as trending discussions and specific category and community stories. In 2013, the website gave users the ability to submit their own content. This happens to have been very popular for individuals to openly share content relatable to mental health.

By BuzzFeed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

BuzzFeed is a prominent news site shared across many social media platforms, particularly Facebook. With the ability for users to submit to the community section of the site many personal insights can be shared about mental health. It also establishes a platform for important content to be shared virally. BuzzFeed also reports on some of the more challenging subjects of mental health that mainstream media might not be so quick to publish.

From a question I asked on Twitter it appears that Facebook, primarily where Buzzfeeed links are circulated, is a popular social media platform to use to open up about and discuss mental health.

A Screenshot form my twitter feed @BreakThe_Mould

Whilst mental health has been a prominent topic of 2015 the news is also continuously reporting on other events and important stories happening locally and globally. It can therefore, be easy for mental health stories to be pushed aside and quickly forgotten about. However, with the internet as a tremendous part of our daily lives, allowing individuals to self-publish material either via microblogging or submitting content through websites such as BuzzFeed; topics such as mental health can be kept prominent by the public with the help of these online aids.

BuzzFeed can help to keep subjects the public find important within the news sphere due to the ability to share content across their social media platforms. Our increased user-time on sites such as BuzzFeed, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr only increase the positive exposure to important topics, particularly mental health.

Take a look at this Storify highlighting more of the benefits of BuzzFees and The Huffington Post.

With such a variety of news outlets available at the touch of your finger tips and across so many different media platforms, it's important for readers and curators to pick out the best and most relevant content.

Tabled for public domain reuse. Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NHS.svg

When using a platform such as Storify it is obvious how important such an inventive tool can effectively be used for curating relevant and interesting content. Allowing audiences to engage with the vast majority of news and reactions about a topic that has been popular. In one Storify, I reflect on 2015 and mental health news. During this process it was picking important articles and tweets from throughout the year giving an accurate reflection of the news and events. This was imperative to allow you, the audience, to have read truthful and an accurate understanding.

As I searched for important news that symbolised each milestone throughout the year, it became apparent that this timeline would highlight to the reader any positive or negative changes as well as the overarching themes, challenges and outcomes faced by the NHS when dealing with mental health patients in 2015.

It was a piece to set the tone and look at how we as a country are dealing with mental health. By highlighting the unfortunate negatives and some of the incredible positives it allows understanding of what we have achieved in 2015 and what needs to be focused on for 2016. As well as what changes we, as the general public should be fighting for.

Also on Storify a post about how powerful Twitter can be in the mental health news allowed me to understand the importance of being ethical with the tweets I was including within the Storify content. Whilst I had an ethical mind to the story I was creating and the content I was using, it was very important to me to showcase how personal, raw and emotional tweets had such an impact. It is important to spread effective awareness with such personal, raw and emotional tweets giving people an insight and understanding to the topic that they may not of had before.

I concluded that including tweets that discussed one individuals admittance to a psychiatric ward were still very personal accounts and under an ethical practice I deemed this to still be a little close to the line to include in this Storify. However, in hindsight Storify is an amazing news platform as it allows journalists to use such raw and personal tweets within their news story to highlight how important the platform is at allowing personal expression and insight that news stories previously couldn't.

Storify, is also a great tool for reporting on events and people's reaction to them. Here I created a Storify of Twitter's reaction to Professor Green's Suicide and me documentary on BBC 3. It was very important to showcase people's reactions to the content and leave the reader with a sense of understanding to how the public felt about such a documentary and it was refreshing to see such positive and supportive reactions.

Another Storify I created curated content about mental health on the platforms BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. Storify was great for this as it allowed me to showcase how important Twitter is in spreading the word about content as well as sharing with the audience some really interesting posts.