Five years ago, in June 2009, I met then broadcaster Mark Little in a Dublin hotel.

At the time he was a well known anchor on the flagship RTÉ Primetime programme. I was a long-time blogger and at the time worked as a copy editor at the Irish Examiner newspaper.

I was introduced to Mark by one of the then interns at RTÉ, Mark Coughlan (with whom I later started TheStory.ie and is now an investigative journalist in his own right at RTÉ). The three of us met at the Morrison Hotel in Dublin — the first of a series of meetings where we discussed the future of the news industry.

At the time, the 2009 Iranian Revolution was being played out, in part on Twitter. It was something we had both been watching via that medium with great interest. iPads had yet to appear, smart phones were still relatively novel and the changes taking the place in the news industry were gathering pace. Twitter was still some way from being as widely used among journalists as it is today.

But we knew there was *something* in all of this content being created and shared online.

It would be many more months before the name “Storyful” was chosen. “Rypl” was also in contention, but was ultimately ruled out.

I officially started with the company in March 2010, and over the following years we built a digital newsroom from the ground up, developed all the methodologies for the discovery, monitoring and verification of social news content — with the Arab Spring forming a kind of test-bed for building those techniques and workflows. Content was appearing at an escalating rate, who was going to sort, filter and verify it? We were the team to do it.

With tech teams both internally and externally my job was to formulate technologies to help those editorial needs we had developed from scratch, including technology for Twitter lists, event detection and content discovery — while building an amazing team of journalists and technologists intent on changing the nature and business of journalism.

I think we succeeded, and it was largely down to that team, and the vision that drives the company to this day. If there’s one thing I will miss most, it is my colleagues — who are the finest bunch of people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. I’d like to think we engendered a spirit of continuous learning and development, transparency and collaboration — something I think is missing from far too many newsrooms.

And in all the newsrooms I’ve visited I have never seen software development and editorial processes so closely integrated, and their goals so closely shared.

News Corp saw that team and technology and were impressed with what we had done. They liked it so much they acquired us in December for $25m. The exceptionally professional team there have been great mentors, and I have no doubt will help scale the company to new heights and new areas.