Reuters' 'mojo' experiments with Nokia

Reuters' journalists are experimenting with the potential of mobile journalism through a project with Nokia's research centre.

As part of a trial that began earlier this summer, a handful of Reuters' journalists were given mobile handsets that included an application that allows them to edit and then publish multimedia packages of text, video and audio. They don't need to use a computer, and the application has the advantage of metatagging the packages with location, time and so on. The kit included an almost full size plug-in keyboard, tripod (not, I suspect, always used), a mic and a solar power unit, and has been used to cover New York Fashion Week, the Edinburgh TV Festival and the Gadgetoff 2007 festival.

Reuters says it is keen to push the development of multimedia journalism, which has the potential to make on-location reporting extremely fast and immediate, and also allow reporting from more remote locations: photographer Finbarr O'Reilly is one of those using it for reports from Afghanistan and Senegal. It has developed a mobile interface for its journalists that works with the Nokia tools.

The project with Nokia gives the reporters N95 smartphones to play with but a lot of the subtleties of mobile reporting have yet to be defined: the packages need to be short, not too wobbly and focused, but what else works? And what about the potential of geo-location and journalism? Nokia started to explore this as part of a similar research project with the University of Brighton and mobile community firm Ymogen last year.

Experimentation has to be a good thing, but lordy - the fashion clips from behind-the-scenes at the Bill Blass show are really wobbly. Reuters TV's media and tech correspondent Matt Cowan is more successful with a quick vox pop with Google's chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Peter Bazalgette of Endemol at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August. That's where the immediacy and the subject is important enough that the wobbliness can be overlooked. Mostly. But the phones are being used by different reporters with different skills - some broadcast, some photographers and some text journalists, so the results will be mixed.

Cowan said the interesting thing was the reaction of people to being interviewed with a mobile phone.

"People were really excited, because it seemed something new and different. At Edinburgh, the talk was of the future of TV, so here we were trying something new," he told me.

For a reporter on the ground, the issue is knowing when a mobile report would be most suitable. When Cowan was dispatched to interview Doris Lessing after her recent Nobel prize, Cowan's team was the first TV crew there.

"Everyone in the world wanted that footage, and I don't think the folks in the office would have been too pleased if I'd decided to film it on my mobile. There's a theatre to television that you just have to let play out. But sometimes the picture doesn't matter as much as the immediacy, and what someone has to say. There's a real interest in hearing what Vint Cerf has to say, or what Peter Bazalgette thinks about Jeremy Paxmans' keynote speech. It's a survey of people's opinions."

For the subjects, being interviewed with a mobile is less intimidating than TV, and more like radio, said Cowan. He thinks there's more potential in taking the mojo experiment on the road and said its "the coolest thing" he's ever worked with.

"From when it was first loaded onto my phone, I was aware of the power of the device and the combination of the professional blogging software with the access to the 1,000 Reuters video clients. That's an amazing power - almost like science fiction.

"It has the potential to capture more everyday life. Everyone sees the potential in this and I think this is the most advanced execution of this kind of mobile video blogging software."

The project manager for Nokia's Research Centre, Timo Koskinen, said in the release that these new toolkits have already transformed the concept and the potential of citizen journalism, which has been another major focus for the development of these toolkits for mobile journalism.

"Citizen journalism is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media, from groups of contributors organised around subject or geographic areas to the casual participation of observers who are lucky - or unlucky - enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event."

The concept of citizen journalism morphing into something recognised more as "public engagement with the media" might make it more palatable to the sceptics, who object to the idea that members of the public could commit random acts of journalism. The concept has already moved towards "crowdsourcing", as we know.

Source: Release

Technorati Tags: PeterBazalgette, Reuters, VintCerf

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