mm journalism

Mojo is the term used to describe a mobile journalist.

A mobile journalist uses only their mobile phone to report their stories.

They can take photos and videos, and type their stories with their mobile phones and then send that story straight to the office to be used immediately.

Reuters journalists use a Nokia phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, a digital microphone and a phone-adapted tripod.

With technology developing so rapidly, soon mobile phones will be able to provide the same photograph and video quality that a HD camera can.

The problem with sending and receiving data from a mobile phone is the high cost.

In Australia, you are charged by the amount of data you send and receive, rather than the time spent on the Internet.

I think mobile journalism will continue to grow.

It is easier and more cost effective for media organisations to send one journalist with a mobile phone, rather than a journalist and a camera man and sound technician. 

This week I read “Five video blogs that do it right” by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo.

This article highlighted five of Maderazo’s favourite video blogs (vlogs), MoBuzz TV, Ask a Ninja, Alive in Baghdad, Wine Library TV and Rocketboom.

These blogs cover a range of topics from food and wine, to news, to technology.

I thought Maderazo made a good point when she discussed how vlogs are filling gaps in television reporting, such as Alive in Baghdad.

We often hear of how many soldiers we have in Iraq and how many casualties Australia has had so far, but rarely do we hear about how the innocent Iraqi people have been affected.

Internet vlogging has once again brought us so much more choice in what we watch.

It is now possible to throw away the regular old television and still be able to watch the news, comedy shows, lifestyle shows and dramas, all on the Internet.

Another thing that is important to mention is that these vlogs are also free, and you can access them any time!

If you miss the news on television, you can watch it on your computer.

Vlogging is also a good way for aspiring journalists to gain experience and show off their talent.

If you can show a potential employer your vlog and how popular it is, then you will stand out from the other potential employees.

I say we embrace the vlog and all the choices and opportunities they create for journalists.

                                                                        Photo courtesy of flickr.com
 

This week I read Stephen Quinn’s story on Stomp (Straits Times online mobile and print), launched by Singapore Press Holdings in Singapore.

Stomp was launched in June 2006, to take advantage of the images and footage news organisations were receiving via user-generated content.
Most images Stomp receives are published on the website, with only low-quality photographs and offensive images not published.

About three to four images per day are sent from Stomp to the Singapore Press Holdings newspapers and are published in the newspapers.

Stomp sounds very similar to OhmyNews, however there is one major difference; Stomp does not allow citizen journalists to write the stories.

They utilise witness accounts and photographs of certain situations, however, Stomp producers write the actual story from the information that the citizen gives them.

The story is then published on the website, the citizen is then notified and asked to check the story.

If the citizen doesn’t like the story, or thinks that the facts are wrong, then they can notify the producer, and the story is changed.

I personally do not like this method. If I were to gather information for a story, including photographs, I would not be happy about giving that information to someone else to write up, so they can get the credit for the story!

I think that writing the story is the easy part, it’s the information gathering that is difficult.

And this situation is still putting journalist’s out of work. If anyone is going to be given information to write up a news story, surely it should be a journalist, not a producer?!

This week I read a review on free photo gallery editors, “Which is the best free photo gallery editor? Part Two”. The review looked at Picasa, PictureTrail, BubbleShare and SlideFlickr.

Picasa came first for its supposed simplicity and taking the least amount of time to create a slideshow. This may work well for PC users, but as a Mac user, I spent hours just trying to download Picasa to my computer, which still has not worked. I watched the YouTube video on how to use Picasa, and also read the help pages, none of which actually helped! I will keep persevering though, so watch this space!

I have created a slideshow before, however, and this technology is generally simple and easy to use. I think, in terms of journalism, this is a great tool for news websites to use, because it makes it easier for the consumer. I like the idea of having themed slideshows, such as the recent fire at Myer. On a news website, it makes it fast and easy to search for specific photos’, which are then displayed in an easy to use manner. However, if I wanted to share my personal photos with family and friends, then I think FaceBook is the much quicker and easier option!

It is so easy now to create a blog, and there can be so many facets to your blog. You can podcast, moblog or vlog, as well as just plain old blog! And now journalists are turning to blogs, vlogs, podcasts and moblogs to publish their stories, so people hear, read or watch them, the way the journalist intended, rather than be restricted by employers citing things like time.

Multimedia reporting is becoming increasingly popular as technology is developing which makes it easy for anyone to film, edit and publish their own stories to the Internet. The problem with this kind of reporting, is that anyone can do it, which means that people do not have to adhere to journalism ethics codes and guidelines. This means that we often can’t trust what we read or view on the Internet.

People often publish information on their blogs about topics they know little about, yet imply that they are experts on the topic. And often, it is difficult to find out who wrote the blog, and what (if any) their qualifications are, or if they really are who they say they are. A teenager writing how much they like a fast food brand, or a type of clothing brand, could really be that organisations public relations practitioner ‘astroturfing’.

This week I watched a YouTube video on OhmyNews, an online news site based in South Korea, which uses citizen journalists to report the news. I also read “OhmyNews in South Korea” by Stephen Quinn.

OhmyNews started with 4 citizen journalist in 2002 and now has 60 000 correspondents.

With the copious amounts of new technology constantly being developed, it is easy for ordinary citizens to contribute to news.

All one really needs is a mobile phone. You can take photos and videos with most mobile phones, and quickly and easily upload that information to the Internet, where it can be distributed to news websites.

Citizen journalism is interesting and certainly provides a different perspective, however, if anyone, anywhere, can be given a job as a journalist, no training needed, then doesn’t that make my university course pointless?

And sure, there might be some citizen journalists that are better than us journalism students/graduates, but I think that will be quite rare.

I feel that I have much more to offer as a journalist now, than I did before commencing my course. And just because technology now is very easy to grasp, and readily available, does not mean every Tom, Dick and Harry should be able to call themselves a citizen journalist, and get a job reporting the news.

How long does a ‘citizen journalist’ have to work as a journalist before they drop the ‘citizen’ and become just a ‘journalist’?

In ten years time at OhmyNews, will the original journalists who started out with the company be sacked because they are no longer ‘citizen journalists’, they’re just plain over-experienced ‘journalists’?

  Photo courtesy of flickr.com

This weeks readings were Make money around free content by F Wilson in Wired Magazine and Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business by C Anderson in Wired Magazine.

After reading these articles it is easy to see how print media make more revenue from their advertisements than the Internet does from its advertisements. To put an advertisement in a newspaper there is a set fee. Regardless of how many people buy the newspaper that day, week or month, the advertiser’s fee remains the same. However with the Internet, the fee can vary depending on the number of views the advertisement gets. For example some common Internet pricing refers to “cost per thousand views” (CPM advertisements), “cost per click” (CPC advertisements), “cost per transaction” (CPT advertisements). So basically, if no one looks at your advertisement, then you don’t pay for it. Whereas in a newspaper, if no one looks at your advertisement, you still pay the same amount of money, and so the profit margins are larger.

It is also worth noting whether people will continue to pay for information that can also be accessed for free, if it means they will get that information more quickly, and sent directly to them, rather than having to search for it. An example of this is people subscribing to things such as weather reports on their mobile phones. A current weather report is always available on the Internet, and is constantly being updated on the news on television, however some people still pay for these services because they are more convenient. To have the weather report sent to you directly, saves time and the hassle of searching for it yourself. A lot of people are happy to spend money on information that is available free if it means saving them precious time. And it looks like this trend will continue.

User-generated Content and the Changing News Cycle by Stephen Quinn and Deirdre Quinn-Allan.
It is really difficult to remember a time without the Internet. And it is incredible just how quickly the Internet has grown and become part of our everyday lives. And now, things like reading a newspaper over breakfast are becoming a thing of the past, especially for those of us who grew up with the Internet. It is second nature for us to search the net for news, rather than sitting down and spending an hour reading the newspaper. Newspaper sales nearly everywhere are decreasing and people are getting free news with more choice (just search any major newspaper) from the Internet.

Bloggers are creating 16 000 posts per hour which is more than Associated Press’s (the largest news organisation in the world) total content. This is why major news organisations are extending their reach into blogs, vlogs (video blogs) and moblogs (mobile blogs). And to stay current, user-generated content is being used more and more often on these websites and in broadcast and print journalism. The Boxing Day tsunami (2004) and London Bombings (2005) are examples of when ordinary citizens contributed to the media. Their mobile phone footage and amateur videos of the tsunami actually happening were the main images the world saw. Journalists can’t be in every place at once to film and report on these events as they unfold, which is why user-generated content (UGC) is so important today.

This week I read “Why and how convergence is emerging” in Convergent Journalism: The fundamentals of multi-media reporting, New York: Peter Lang.

Media convergence is the combination of all aspects of media (broadcast, print, the Internet etc) coming together to deliver current news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to the public who are now more picky than ever about where they get their news from.

Because people are now working longer weeks, with less leisure time, they are choosing to get their news whenever they can, rather than waiting for a ‘news update’ on the television or radio, or wasting time going out and purchasing a newspaper.

Now, newspaper websites (such as the Geelong Advertiser) have video journalists posting stories on their websites, as well as writing for print.

So to visit a news website, you often get more mediums than just the text, which gives the consumer more choice in how they receive their news.

Stephen Quinn talks about the invention of the Internet changing the way people get the news.

More and more people are turning to the Internet, and with the Internet being so easily accessible, and free, it is easy to see why newspaper sales have been decreasing.

In particular the younger generation are more likely to access the Internet for their news rather than spending a dollar every day on a newspaper.

One of the great things about Internet news sites is that they are constantly being updated.

You don’t have to wait for the morning newspaper or the 6pm news on television in order to find out more about a story. You can just search it on the Internet.

Stephen Quinn also talks about the cost of newsgathering decreasing due to better technology such as mobile phones with cameras and video cameras.

However the downside to this is the poor quality images and videos we are now seeing regularly on television news and in newspapers.

Jane Stevens ‘Multimedia storytelling’ (http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/) is a step-by-step look at how to create a multimedia current affairs story. Multimedia stories incorporate video, still photographs, audio, graphics, maps and text. I found the Stevens reading very interesting and practical. In my opinion multimedia journalism makes watching stories much more fun and interesting. Because multimedia stories are interactive, they give the reader the choice of which parts to read, and which parts to skip. Take the way Stevens has set out her story on the ‘Dancing Rocks’ for example. A reader could skip ‘An eerie world’ and go straight to ‘Why do they move’. If a reader is in a hurry, and all they want to know is why the rocks move, then they have the option to just see/read that section of the story, without having to skim through the rest.

Personally, from a journalists perspective, I find video journalism (journalists who shoot their own stories rather than having a camera crew) much more rewarding. You shoot your own footage, and edit it, so, ultimately, you as a journalist get more of a say in what goes into (and what is left out of) your story.

Stevens also talked about creating a storyboard to help structure and define your story. I think this is a great idea because, before you even conduct your interviews, you’ve got the background information for your story, and you know the direction that you’re heading.