That was cool enough. What I didn’t expect was how Deb Roy has since applied his research in language acquisition to the intersection of public media and online conversations.

Think ABC’s #QandA on steroids, but instead of just monitoring or displaying the hashtag, it’s mapping every public conversation and connection that’s taking place around a program or individual broadcast.

I had an interview request about mobile journalism, or mojo, from Air Force News of all places.
The editor, Simone Liebelt, is a former student of Deakin University academic and mobile journalism expert Stephen Quinn, who recommended me as “one of the pioneers in Australia” for the story on Mobile Journalism trends. The following are some of the answers I was going to email in, but we ended up talking over the phone.
Read on for my ideas about using mobile phones for news gathering.

AIRFORCE NEWS: When did you start using mobile phones for news gathering and did you introduce it to your colleagues?

earleyedtion: In my first week as an intern at The Courier-Mail in February 2007, I took a PDA phone to an interview at the International Airport. The interview was with Wayne Bennett as the Broncos were leaving for England and the World Club Challenge. After the interview, I emailed the audio file back to the office, and the online editors were able to edit and put it online before I even arrived back from the airport.

In June 2007 I made the first stilted attempts at using a mobile phone for following (not gathering) the news, when I joined Twitter. Twitter still offered 250 free SMS updates a week, and I was only following a few news accounts, so started receiving “breaking” news to my mobile phone. It was news already being reported by mainstream media, but it was immediate alerts to things I might not have already been aware of. I wouldn’t say I introduced my colleagues to it, but did tell them about potential stories, especially the online subs if it was an interesting story we didn’t yet know about or have online.

Beyond that, I wasn’t really using a mobile phone for news gathering (eg images or video). Since then I have made some attempts at live streaming video from a news scene, and taking my own images and video, but generally on a point and shoot camera, rather than a mobile phone.

Did the trend catch on quickly and what has the reaction been from your fellow journos?

It was The Courier Mail online news room who suggested I record and send back the audio. Unbelievably, that was two years ago now. I say unbelievably because that was an example of how we could start using mobiles to break news, but it’s now two years later and that sort of newsgathering has still not progressed to be standard industry practice.

Fellow journos are open to trying things like that, using mobiles in the field, but it either hasn’t been encouraged or pushed enough. We’ve had people send in video from the field on a mobile phone. But again, I can only think of one occasion where that has happened. It takes a change of mindset. People have to be thinking of it, have it on their mind

What inspired you, i.e. overseas media agencies using the technology or Prof Quinn’s work?

A bit of both. The first thing that got my interest was the Reuters MoJo program. They were testing Nokia N95s to report, including in Africa. What was unique was that they were using only the N95. They got a little bit of help rigging up an external microphone connection that usually wouldn’t be possible, but the results were great.

I also tutored for a semester at the University of Queensland in web production, trying to help get a bit more online production into the curriculum. While I was there Professor Quinn came to talk to UQ SJC staff about some of the work he was doing with Fairfax. Fairfax  were starting to roll out and use the iMate JasJam phone as their multimedia reporting device – using hard foldout keyboards for typing on the go. I wanted to try that.

Would you say you are a Mojo pioneer in Australia, and if so, why?

I wouldn’t say I am a mojo pioneer in Australia. In truth I rarely get the opportunity to do things that are truly “mobile” in their use.
not sure how much I’m actually doing as mojo. It certainly isn’t my job description, just something I’d like to make happen.

I have not particularly seen journalists who would specifically describe themselves as “mobile”. The closest is perhaps fully multimedia journalists who do everything. For example there are some ABC multimedia journalists who use a high def digital video camera to take stills, audio and video. But I’m not sure if they are then mobile in their editing and sending content, or if they then return to a studio.

The only way I might be pioneering is that I’m actively looking for applications and accessories that would facilitate the mobile journalist.  So whether that’s using an iPhone, a Nokia, or a phone running Windows Mobile, I’ve been trying to find things specifically created for the mobile journalist. There aren’t many that I’ve found.

What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of the Mojo, and are you a big advocate?

I expanded more on this answer when Simone interviewed me on the phone…

Advantages: mobile. Go anywhere.

Disadvantages: Quality. I don’t think it’s much of an issue, but it holds people back who are constrained by a misconception about “broadcast quality”. There’s a possible lack of resources…maybe a feeling of disconnectedness from the newsroom, or the perception of a lack of support in news decision making… but I don’t really believe those things would be a problem.

If you’re equipped with a lightweight but powerful laptop, and an internet connection, which obviously thanks to 3G wireless networks means you can be connected almost anywhere, I really don’t see many disadvantages. When you know you’re going to be truly remote without any net connection, maybe you’ll have a satellite phone…

Do you think it will replace professional camera equipment in the future, and will it promote members of the general public to become field reporters?

When you start talking about “mobile journalist”, you’re starting to blur the lines between the professional and the public journalist, which I’m not against. People all over the world are on the ground in places a journalist might not be able to get to for a long period of time.

Again, when you say “it” in regards to MOJO, are you talking about phones, or compact DV cams? I think everything will get smaller and more compact. There will always be professional quality and consumer quality products, but I do think professional camera equipment will change in the future. In the same way that it has changed over the years, it will catch up with technology.  As someone once said, so-called “broadcast quality” in the 70s or 80s was horrendous, compared to so-called “broadcast quality” now. And if a cheap DV-cam can now produce better quality than what was considered “broadcast quality” in the 80s, then I think it has, and could have, replaced that earlier professional camera equipment.

Do you think it will become standard practice, and how soon?

I’m not sure it will become a standard practice. I also expanded on this question on the phone. Generally, I think that I’ve seen little to no movement in the past two years about mobile journalism moving towards standard practice, so don’t hold out much hope of it speeding up unless there are people in positions of influence who are serious about making it happen.

Can you give me any recent examples of where only Mojos have captured events (i.e. no standard methods used)?

No standard methods? No, I can’t think  of any!  What do you mean by no standard methods? Like no office involved at all? Completely done on the road?

Anything else you would like to mention?

Something I’ve been thinking about over the last week is how do you actually define the MoJo?  Perhaps this is where academics like Stephen Quinn come in, as people who probably can apply a theoretical or academic approach to it as well. So is it someone who does things ONLY with a mobile phone? Or is it someone who is able to do things, “from the road”? Because “from the road” can expand quite a bit to include massive cameras and equipment… You don’t want to limit the possibilities with a restrictive definition, so to me it’s more something along the lines of “nimble”. Able to be as mobile or as nimble as possible. To edit audio or video you need a laptop, so does that remove it from being MoJo, because you’ve gone outside the mobile phone?

I don’t think that should remove it from the realms of MoJo. If you’re expected to edit audio or video before sending it back to the newsroom, you’ll need a laptop. Then to send it you might have to use your mobile’s 3G connection, so I think it’s difficult to limit MoJo to the mobile phone exclusively.

Simone mentioned she had also talked to Miguel de Souza from AAP about MoJo. His opinion will carry more authority than mine.

Related articles by Zemanta

• An experiment in Mobile Journalism or MoJo (earleyedition.com)

In January I experimented with a little mobile journalism, or MoJo, on a small story. Using Qik on a Dopod mobile phone, I live streamed video from the scene of a unit fire on Brisbane’s south side.

This was by no means an experiment in mobile journalism that even basically covered how MoJo could be done, it was simply a spur of the moment decision to give it a go. These are my thoughts on the process.

One of the videos watching fire fighters go about their work after they had already put the fire out.

Interview with the fire officer in charge

This video was taken with a TV cameraman alongside me. The use of his light was crucial. I had earlier interviewed the officer in charge using my point and shoot camera, but the footage was very poor without a light on the subject.

Each time I started a new video stream an update was sent to Twitter. While I was live streaming to the internet several people used Qik’s inbuilt comment facility to send me comments asking where I was, who I was with, and what was going on.

Pro: There is the potential for community or viewer input during a live interview. The journalist could invite questions from the audience, choosing one or several to ask directly if appropriate.
Con: None really. The comments don’t create a notification sound or show in the video. The only issue is if a journalist thinks they might be distracted, but this is easily overcome by turning off comments.

The vision is streaming live to the internet.
Pro: No editing required before original content can be viewed. Gives audience the very real sense of “being there”, and participating in the event or interview.
Con: For mainstream media, there could be the paralysing fear of loss of control. What might someone say or do? Not just say in terms of “offensive” language, but saying something that could present a serious legal problem, like accusing someone of being responsible for a crime. The fear is not irrational, but TV do live crosses all the time.
Another loss of control is the ability to embed the video anywhere. That means competitors could simply put the embed code on their own site. This isn’t a problem if there is a way of appropriately branding the video because viewers will still know who created the content, no matter where they see it.

Apart from live streaming to the internet, I also took images and video on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W110. In some cases this was concurrent, simply holding the camera under the phone while one streamed and the other recorded.

The most compelling footage of the fire was shot on a mobile phone by a neighbour, not a member of the media. Connecting our phones via Bluetooth, he was able to give me the footage of flames shooting from the window. That phone footage was used on TV news the following day and can be seen embedded in the Courier Mail story here.

The videos above are in a live emergency services situation, but standard interviews are of course also possible. I’ve been experimenting with Qik, but UStream and other services are available as well.

Interview with Qik co-founder
Innovations in Journalism – live streaming video from mobiles developed by Qik
In the comments at that page: “Tip to Qiksters – buy a cellphone tripod.” I couldn’t agree more.

A post of mine from 2007, some of my earliest interest in mobile journalism came out of the Reuters MoJo lab.
the earley edition – Mobile Journalism Toolkit

Stephen Quinn is a journalism academic at Deakin University who specialises in Mobile Journalism. One place you can follow his thoughts is on the GlobalMojo blog.
He’s a good man to follow if you’re interested in mobile journalism, particularly in the Asia Pacific region.

She’s been in the newspaper industry so long, I think Helen would bleed ink, and will quietly mourn the state of the newspaper industry.

I realized really how dedicated I was to newspapers, which are dying.

via huffington post via crikey

You can also read through the live Future of Journalism tweets from various people on the day.

What I’m providing here is just a quick video of a question I asked of news.com.au editor David Higgins about the use of social networking tools for newsgathering.

Video after the jump…

About the conference itself, there wasn’t really a great deal suggested in the way of what the future might actually hold for ‘journalism’. Although for newspapers, a comment by David Higgins is worth noting. He said that more morning commuters were moving to mobile phones for their news instead of newspapers, and suggested the future of the weekday paper in physical form could be in doubt.

“Monday to Friday, I don’t think the outlook’s very good,” he said.

In the process of asking a question from the floor earlier David said that, since they started promoting news.com.au as an iPhone optimised site, traffic was up by more than 50,000 hits per month.

Either check out the video directly directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page. If you think it’s worth sharing please send the links around, or digg it.

James Smith first tried singing 18 months ago. That was karaoke – now he’s had 10 singing lessons, and on Saturday night he sang Nessun Dorma and several others at the Bastille Day Grand Dinner Ball.

I shot and edited the video. I rarely get to play with the video cameras these days… This is the first interview James has ever done. A story to rival Paul Potts – the singing mobile phone salesman from Britain’s Got Talent (YouTube link).We had to go with the video before both commercial TV news stations got him, despite my rough shooting and editing skills (back lighting on his porch, and why the hell is there not a tripod in that kit?). Both commercial stations did a story on their Saturday 6pm bulletins, 18 hours after my video went online, but this was James Smith’s first ever interview.

Again, either check out the video directly at YouTube, or read a little bit about him and watch the video on the story page.

I had embedded the video here, but something to do with the code broke my webpage, so visit the links to see it.

I recently posted saying it’s not possible to use the online video service, Hulu, in Australia or any country outside the US.

Well, I was wrong. Don Day at Lost Remote was kind enough to make a post about a new service called OPENhulu, where you can download a third-party application that will allow you to watch Hulu shows.

To do this, you must download Hotpot Shield, free software that makes it look like you are browsing from an IP in the United States, therefore allowing you to watch Hulu content via the OPENhulu website.

It’s not entirely foolproof. On downloading the program for use, you only receive a 10 gigabyte bandwidth limit per month to run through their system, which will limit the number of full-length shows you can watch.

You will want to have some good high-speed broadband to be able to watch Hulu’s NBC shows through OPENhulu. Trying to port video content through the Hotspot Shield has proved nigh on impossible for me, simply because of my broadband speed.
I’m on a wireless 3G internet connection, which claims speeds up to 512kbps but rarely reaches 300.

I don’t think you’re required to watch videos through the OPENhulu site. I was also able to watch videos directly at Hulu.com, but it does run ALL your internet traffic through the Hotspot Shield, so whether watching Hulu videos or not, it will slow down your entire browsing experience until you turn off the filter.

It does work though, and that’s the important thing! The videos started downloading and playing for me, even if that was happening too slowly to actually watch them. There is also no message of death informing you the video is not available in your region.

If you were asking the question, “How do I watch Hulu outside of the United States?”, here is your answer to what has likely been a painfully long search.

Enjoy!

The example suggesting there was little money in online video mentioned Perez Hilton from TMZ, who claims to have only made $5,000 from 25 million video views on YouTube. Safran says Perez could realistically be making $500,000 a month.

Of course Perez isn’t making money off video. He’s hosting it on YouTube. That’s a free service. He doesn’t have control over pre-roll tied with banner ads or any of the tracking that’s required to make advertisers want your product. He’s paying nothing for video hosting, so naturally he’s getting next to nothing in return.

Even at a modest $20 CPM (and this should be $30 – $40), he could be bringing in $500,000 a month in preroll ads. He’s missing out on $6 million in inventory.

Safran is adamant that just because you can’t make much money off YouTube doesn’t mean there is no money to be had in online video.

via Lost Remote TV Blog

So what is it about owning your brand that brings in the advertisers? Safran points out that Perez may not be making as much money as he could because of ownership rights to those videos. When online newspapers do video, the ‘wire’ videos from Reuters and Sky News (in Australia) are generic news items. Often they’re not local, or locally owned.

If you don’t get a lot of views, perhaps its because people are aware they could get that news and video at any other site, since you’ll often see the same ‘wire’ video across competing sites, as you would agency stories across print.

So what will a viewing public repeatedly come back looking for? Trusted local content delivery. By trusted, I mean people are aware that the video they want to see can be found with your media organisation so they will eventually, unprompted, return repeatedly to see what’s new.

In the case of TMZ, this is guaranteed celebrity video, pictures and humiliation that will be regularly updated, and that either can’t be seen anywhere else, or is just easier to find on TMZ because you know it will be there. You can ‘trust’ there will be something there to see.

In the case of local news sites, the only video of interest to your loyal readers or viewers that you can guarantee to always have is – local video. And if you do it well, they keep coming back, just to see if you’ve got the video they trust you’ll have. As local content, you absolutely won’t get the 25 million video views that celebrity clips will get on YouTube, but if you’re getting a large chunk of the local population, that translates into excellent advertising dollars locally.

So I remain a believer in the potential of locally produced online news video, and the market for it. Corey Bergman makes a good point in the post in question, consumers are going to begin demanding more accessible content.

Just vaguely thinking about doing online and mobile content delivery won’t cut it. Our news sites need to be aggressive in developing their own multi-platform content-delivery solutions so that, again, by making themselves the reliable point of content consumption they capture the new market, rather than try to catch up with it.

I like the thought of that future, but hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around the concept of how the journalist could record audio, video, get some stills and take a few handwritten notes all at the same time.

The picture I had was similar to that of the one-man band – bass drum strapped to back, harmonica brace, foot pedals, cymbals between the knees and a violin for some fast fiddling.

But for Jane Munro, one of the Radio Online producers for the ABC, it’s just part of the job.

‘When I am shooting a video story I use the camera to acquire everything I need to publish on a range of platforms.
‘I extract the audio from the video package, and sometimes broadcast that audio unchanged as a complete radio package. I then extract still images from the video to accompany a text article. That and a compressed version of the video is published on our local website.’

More available from Issue 48 of Inside the ABC

Some journalists can’t wrap their heads around more than asking questions and taking notes. It’s easy enough to set up and leave a small camera on a tripod while you interview someone, or record audio (which many do for personal record anyway), but the problem comes in the production process.

The editing and posting online of content is where more technical skills are needed. Journalists shouldn’t be expected to learn and do these things themselves, but those who can or want to should be given the opportunity, and this is where organisation-wide collaborative systems need to be in place to make it possible.

It requires just a little effort. If a stills photographer has been taking their own camcorder out on jobs years before newspapers – let alone video – went online, it would be unwise of the organisation to not recognise that persons worth, or encourage their efforts.

John Moore, a photographer who was snapping pics just metres from Benazir Bhutto’s motorcade when she was killed, talks about the rally and that day.

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto | The New York Times

Audio with random photos overlaid is not great. A slideshow with managed photo placement to associated narration is great. For a newsroom that thinks they can’t afford video (they can), well produced audio slideshows are a good way to make your readers more open to the future introduction of video content.

As online visits and online video viewership grows across every demographic, where does online news video fit in? The online department of a newspaper can’t cover every story in video, and shouldn’t be expected to. In Australia, international or national video stories for newspaper sites come from wire services, such as Reuters or Sky News video.

There’s no reason, however, for them not to come from independent video makers, or user-generated content, because they are competing with video-sharing sites.

What online newspapers should be doing better is local news video. They’re better placed and have better local knowledge to make the story more personal for their viewers. If they won’t do it themselves, providing the platform for user-generated content to appear could also be a ‘ratings’ winner.

User-generated ‘news’ content can be uploaded to a slew of video sharing sites, but it’s effectively invisible if people don’t know where it is or how to find it. Create the platform, and viewers will come to you for the people’s news, supplemented by your own. It doesn’t have to be extremely difficult either.

The Pew Internet: Video Sharing report showed that 15 per cent of respondents had visited a video-sharing site within a day, compared to 8 per cent in the survey a year earlier.

Overall, 48 per cent of those surveyed reported ‘ever’ visiting a video-sharing site, up from 33 per cent in 2006.

The largest percentage growth of users visiting video-sharing sites daily came from high school graduates, whose usage grew from five to 13 per cent, and was followed by women, who jumped from five to 11 per cent.

The largest demographic of daily video-sharing site users in 2007 was the 18-29 age bracket, of whom 30 per cent reported daily video views. The next largest demographic was men, of whom 20 percent reported using a video site ‘yesterday’ in the survey.

The only demographic in the survey not to record a growth in daily usage of online video sites was people aged 65 and over, who remained unchanged at four per cent use.

From a Pew Internet report from July 2007, half of those who view videos share the link, while three quarters of online video viewers reported receiving video links from others.
Pew Internet: Online Video.

Make your news video shareable, or even easier to view, and again the viewers will appreciate it.

Since then I’ve received my beta testing login details. With a great deal of excitement I went to Hulu.com to see what fantastic wonders would be presented to me.

None. If you’re in Australia, bad luck – it’s a case of look, but don’t touch.

For now, Hulu is a U.S. service only. That said, our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide. This requires clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific geography and will take time.

Being limited to North America because of distribution rights, international users are agonisingly teased by a long list of currently popular TV shows they can’t watch – Arrested Development, Family Guy, Scrubs, King of The Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office… the list goes on, and unless you have a beta login to Hulu (get on the waiting list) none of those links will get you anywhere.

With a login, choosing any episode from one of those shows takes you to the video player screen, right to the excited point of ‘Loading Video’ before slapping you in the face – rejection.

But I want to take advantage of the options alongside the video player – share, embed, watch it full screen! Hopefully it’s not too long before something is up and running for Australia.

In a desperate attempt to see the video player in action, I tried some older shows in the hope they were no longer affected by distribution rights. Thankfully, even Doogie Howser episodes (Breaking Up is Hard to Doogie) from 1989 were unavailable.

The potential of this application is huge. When I read the description of what it would do, I couldn’t wait to try it. Unfortunately the interface isn’t entirely user-friendly at the moment, but it’s in beta, so expect something great to come.

For what is obviously planned for this media player the ABC is again demonstrating why Australians go to them for original online audio and video content – because they try to make it easily accessible.

Often they succeed in the attempt, and that’s why their podcasts and vodcasts have enjoyed such popularity. ABC digital content has succeeded because it is available. If there’s not much to choose from, people move on. The ABC’s integration online of text, audio and video content is impressive, to say the least.

If you haven’t seen it, check out an example of their in-page video player on this story.

The News Ltd paper I work for (full disclosure) went so far as to declare in March 2007 that “YouTube’s dominance of online video content is about to end”.

Hulu.com is the outworking of that effort and is now in beta, and it’s looking pretty good.

Something very few news sites are doing today is incorporating social networking opportunities into their structure.  Even less are incorporating social networking into their video content – which remains for the most part clunky and unappealing.

Hopefully Hulu will change that for News Ltd/Corp.  This aspect of the current beta player is promising.

The “embed” function allows you to set in and out points, so you can embed just a selected chunk of a video clip on your blog.

I really hope this technology gets rolled out to all News Ltd/Corp sites, because it will exponentially enhance video content accessibility.

A review of Hulu at LostRemote.

Also, if your “talent” isn’t talented enough to be on air, why are they talented enough to be online?  Be very clear here, he’s not saying they shouldn’t be online, but that television and web are different.  Tell people not to think of themselves as speaking for television, and the imperfection and quirkiness of being themselves can be the selling point.

As Safran says, there is a difference between “real and quirky” and “bad delivery”.

via LR – The web is not the TV minor leagues