Here is a superb example of how a journalist used a mobile phone to produce an investigative story. Jeremy Jojola is an investigative reporter with KOB4 in Albuquerque in New Mexico, USA. An alleged scam artist approached Jojola to sell “high quality speakers” and Jojola captured the event on his mobile phone. It went to air that night. Wonderful journalism.
The world’s first professional-quality video editor for the iPhone, 1st Video, will be unveiled at this year’s NAB. VeriCorder, a Canadian software company, writes apps for the iPhone. Other apps on show at NAB will include audio editor VC Audio Pro and Showcase, which combines still images and sound to make multi-media packages. Reporters can replace thousands of dollars of cumbersome equipment with a single software program on their iPhone. The NAB show is the world’s largest gathering of broadcast media professionals. It will be held in Las Vegas from April 12-14.
This web site has a fine collection of mojo reports from the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Watch and learn.
A Polk award for journalism has gone to a piece of mobile phone journalism for the first time. A video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, who died during anti-government protests in Iran in 2009, was sent to The Guardian and later put on YouTube. “This video footage was seen by millions and became an iconic image of the Iranian resistance,” said John Darnton, curator of the Polk Awards, in the New York Times. “We don’t know who took it or who uploaded it, but we do know it has news value. This award celebrates the fact that, in today’s world, a brave bystander with a cellphone camera can use video-sharing and social networking sites to deliver news.”
The Digital Media and Wireless Association of British Columbia (DigiBC) and VeriCorder Technology unveiled the MoJo Revolution for the Winter Olympics. It’s a new way to gather and distribute news using only a smart phone. David Barkwell, senior vice president for sales and marketing of British Columbia-based VeriCorder, describes its new application as “integral to the world’s most ambitious and innovative assignment to date in mobile journalism”. Mojo Revolution consists of a sports broadcasting network powered solely by VeriCorder’s software running on iPhones. When the Winter Games start on February 12, journalism students from the University of Missouri, BCIT, Fanshawe College, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Langara plus a group of professional reporters will be recording, editing and filing stories on the web, and streaming audio and video, using VeriCorder’s new ShowCase multimedia software.
Before and during the games, VeriCorder and DigiBC are offering 200 free Showcase software licences, plus training and hardware, to journalists, journalism students, and bloggers covering sporting and other events in and around the Winter Games.
This Mashable article offers a useful article that describes five useful tools for mobile phone reporting.
Apologies for the long delay in posting. Have finally finished two books. The book of most interest to readers of this blog will be the one about mobile journalism. A free pdf of Mojo: Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region can be found here.
A new feature that Twitter says might be available in the next few weeks called “geolocation” should help reporters. The feature uses a mobile phone’s global positioning system (GPS) to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Sounds ideal if you are looking for tweets from a specific place. Ryan Sarver, director of the Twitter platform, leads a “fairly small team” of programmers. They are close to completing the geolocation project, he told The New York Times. “We are about delivering the right information to the right people.”
Joy: New iPhone shoots video. But limited range of video streaming software via iTunes. Qik is available and works well. Testing camera here. This is a useful book.
