Not exactly mojo, but Facebook has launched a site devoted to helping journalists use Facebook. Given Facebook’s huge audience, journalists need to know how to use it.
My presentations about mobile journalism at the World Journalism Education Congress in South Africa received a lovely mention in this blog post by Deb Wenger. Her blog Advancing the Story is a must read.
Ramaa Sharma has produced an excellent video for the BBC’s College of Journalism on how to be a mojo. Make sure you also read the associated blog post for the good advice.
Had a useful conversation about mojo with Josh Villanueva, who runs a team of reporters for GMA, while I was in Manila. GMA and ABS-CBN are the two main broadcasters in the Philippines. Josh said he would love to supply the latest iPhones to all his reporters. It would be a perfect combination, he said. But he highlighted the limitations of the technology. The biggest problems are battery life, durability (”reporters drop their phones a lot”), and the fact that his reporters use one mobile phone company and the iPhone is exclusive to another telco.
Mojos are being used in the strikes at car factories in China. In Zhongshan, workers at the Honda parts factory filmed with their mobile phones security guards attacking workers and uploaded the video. The New York Times reported that though the workers were mostly poor migrants with limited schooling, they were “surprisingly tech savvy”. The paper quoted Prof Guobin Yang of Barnard College in the US: “This is something people have not paid attention to — migrant workers can organise using these technologies.”
A rather odd mojo story, but one we can expect to see more of as mobile phone cameras improve: in Indonesia, police are seeking the people who distributed sex videos via mobile phone. Since earlier this month videos of a Jakarta pop singer known as Ariel and his girlfriends have been circulating around the country. The scandal has become known as Peterporn, after the singer’s band Peterpan. Apologies for shortage of blog posts; have been travelling in areas without much Internet.
Have just discovered this mojo project, where the French daily le Parisien has put a citizen reporting function on its iPhone app. Click on the red YOU button on le Parisien’s site for more details.
Students in La Trobe University’s MA journalism program have compiled a list of the 100 articles every journalist should read.