Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » MoJo

Innovations in Journalism – live streaming video from mobiles developed by Qik

Oliver Luft — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:09:14 +0000

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, it’s live video streamed over the web from mobile phones from Qik.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hi. I’m Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik.

Qik’s vision is to enable anyone with a camera-phone to stream live video from anywhere in the world to the web, TV, mobile phones, and gaming consoles.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
For news – immediacy of information is very important. Qik enables journalists to capture and report news live from wherever they are – without having to wait for the news truck to arrive.

It enables journalists to conduct better interviews by taking questions from anywhere in the world. It provides the ability for viewers on the web to send real-time chat messages to the person streaming the video straight to their phone enabling a high level of interactivity.

As a result journalists are able to conduct richer, better interviews. It also enables journalists to leverage anyone who may be at a particular event to capture the story for them.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are just getting started!

In our current invitation-only alpha release, users with Nokia smartphones can stream live video from their phones to anywhere on the web and playback their Qik videos from their phones.

We are working on addressing other smartphones and Java-enabled phones. We are also working on providing the ability to stream live from phone to phone.

4) Why are you doing this?
We truly believe that sharing and experiencing moments of your life with your friends, family and/or your world is invaluable.

5) What does it cost to use it?
We are currently in a free, invitation-only alpha stage.

6) How will you make it pay?
We are at a very early stage of bringing this innovation to market and focused on ensuring that we deliver high value to the billions of camera phone users globally.

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Innovations in Journalism – live geo-tagged video broadcast from Seero

Oliver Luft — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:00:23 +0000

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, live video streamed over the web with extra geographical information mapped in real-time from Seero.

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m Justin Cutillo, co-founder of Seero. It’s a geo-broadcasting platform that fuses live and on-demand video with GPS mapping.

Our technology is a response to the convergence and proliferation of video and GPS features in the flourishing mobile device market.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Seero was built to reflect the core needs of video bloggers and online journalist. The platform incorporates tools for live mobile broadcasting with additional real-time GPS tracking and static location marking.

We also have a geo-information/advertising server. This system allows us to geo-tag specific information to enhance any broadcasts near that location.

For example, if an online journalist was covering a fire in London, we have the ability to upload facts specific to the building and geo-tag them to the exact location. The information is served based on its proximity to the location of the broadcast.

All you need for mobile broadcasting is a laptop and a mobile broadband card. You can add on an inexpensive GPS receiver for the real-time tracking feature or use an Ultra Mobile PC is you don’t want to carry around a full laptop.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are currently working on some major build items. We should be releasing an embeddable flash player that includes the live video player and the full map functionality within a month. We are also working on a module to add course tracking to previously recorded videos.

Our largest project is to build a mobile broadcasting application for Symbian mobile phones to enable journalist to broadcast live video and GPS right from their Nokia phones.

Beyond that we have a secretive project that could really redefine how people interact with live video on the internet.

4) Why are you doing this?
When it comes down to it we are technology buffs. We came up with the idea on a vacation to San Francisco more than two years ago while thinking of ways to virtually tour a city.

Combining live video and location info opens up new, exciting uses for online video. Needless to say we are very enthusiastic about the prospects.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Besides the hardware cost, which may be very little if you already have a laptop, the service is completely free to all users.

6) How will you make it pay?
We currently envision three main channels of revenue. The first channel involves white label sites built on the Seero infrastructure for promotional as well as professional and government services.

The second channel is geo-advertising. We have a proprietary geo-advertising system that provides a simple and powerful solution for correlating advertising to site content.

Beyond those revenue streams we also see potential for our geo-advertising system as a stand-alone service.

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Social Media Journalist: ‘Services like ustream or qik that live stream video from DV cams and phones have huge potential’ Damon Kiesow

Oliver Luft — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:41:07 +0000

Journalism.co.uk talks to reporters across the globe working at the collision of journalism and social media about how they see it changing their industry. This week, Damon Kiesow, Nashua Telegraph.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
I am the Managing Editor/Online at The Telegraph in Nashua, NH. I am responsible for the overall news presentation and strategy for our digital publications including NashuaTelegraph.com, NHPrimary.com, FeastNH.com and EncoreBuzz.com.

We have a staff of about 50 in the newsroom and nashuatelegraph.com was a finalist in two categories in this year’s Newspaper Association of America Digital Edge Awards.

2. Which web or mobile-based social media tools do you use on a daily basis and why?
On a typical day:

I use each for a variety of reasons. Delicious is my reigning favourite due to the huge filtering and early warning effect it provides. I follow about 78 people, mostly digital media professionals.

A few times per day I review their most recent bookmarks to keep up to date on what they are thinking about and what new tools and toys they have discovered.

I know many of them do the same and some of my ‘best’ ideas we have implemented at the paper have come from those bookmarks.

Twitter serves a similar purpose – and I am following many of the same people as on Delicious. But I like Twitter for the flexibility (IM, phone, PC, Web) and both the immediacy and asynchronous nature of the service.

It is just a great way to stay in touch with people without the burden of reading or responding to email or phone calls.

I use Ning mostly every day to visit sites like wiredjournalists.com, and we have created several Ning sites for the newspaper including Encorebuzz.ning.com.

I have been on LinkedIn for 5 – 6 years and it is still the best place to accumulate business contacts. I probably do not use it every day, but a few times a week I get requests to connect.

Facebook is one I use just due to the critical mass of people they have online. I check it every day and we do have a few small applications running on the service that feed out breaking news from the newspaper. Most of my time there is spent ignoring Zombie and Pirate invitations.

3. Of the thousands of social media tools available, could you single one out as having the most potential for news either as a publishing or a news gathering tool?
If I had to choose from just the tools I use regularly – I would pick Twitter. They have really focused on a core concept and seem very open to letting people expand on it.

It is too early to say if Twitter will be a huge hit for us as a newspaper but we pick up a few followers a week and the trend seems to be increasing.

I like the fact that we can use it both simply to push content (using twitterfeed.com) and as a two-way conversation with readers. We follow anyone who follows us and try to be responsive to questions or comments that come in via our Twitter friends.

In terms of other products – I think the most likely winners this year will be services like ustream.tv or qik.com that allow live streaming video from DV cameras and cell phones respectively.

This has huge potential both as a newsgathering tool and as a social media/self publishing phenomena. We are just starting to experiment with both of these services.

4. And the most overrated in your opinion?
At the moment I consider Facebook to be the most overrated. Things are beginning to change but it is still a walled garden for the most part.

I would not be comfortable investing a lot time or effort in using Facebook as a social media platform for the newspaper without some continued opening up of their API and clarification of their terms of service.

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DNA 2008: CNN says no ‘mojos’ for five years

Laura Oliver — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:13:34 +0000

Laurel Chamberlain, director of digital media for news at Turner Media, told delegates at DNA 2008 that CNN would not be adapting its journalists or content for mobile phones in the near future.

Chamberlain, who was speaking in a panel discussion on the business of mobile news, said there was currently no need to use specially trained mobile journalists or alter content for mobile.

“There are always ways of looking at how we can condense what we put onto mobile, but at this stage I don’t think it’s necessary,” Chamberlain said.

“If people only want to read the first paragraph of a story that’s fine by me, but so far we’ve found they’re reading five or six pages of one story.”

In the UK the Manchester Evening News has been experimenting with mobile journalism, giving reporters Vodafone handsets to file news copy and pictures on the fly.

Reuters has also been conducting its own ‘mojo’ trials since last summer with reporters equipped with lightweight Nokia kits producing multimedia coverage from the US Presidential primaries and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

But Chamberlain said such experiments were not being carried out at CNN: “I don’t think special mobile journalists are coming soon for CNN, maybe in another five years when we are only thinking about the mobile space.”

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Online Journalism India: Moblogging is citizen journalism in India

pramitsingh — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:56:18 +0000

This week’s guest is Pramit Singh, blogger on the Indian new media scene and founder of Bighow.com.

To put it bluntly, India is mobile mad. Indian citizen journalism may thrive across a range blog networks, photo and video sites but what singles it out and makes it unique is the proliferation of micro and mobile blogging sites.

As of January 2008, there were 241 million mobile phones in India and every month 7.8 million new mobiles are bought.

In contrast, the total number with fixed internet connections in India hovers around the ten million mark.

So sites like smsgupshup.com and Vakow.com that allow users to send 160 character group SMS messages are unbelievably popular ways of disseminating information. They are the proxy ’social’ news services, similar in many ways to Twitter. But where traditional news providers have got in on the act quickly with Twitter, in India keen amateurs are happy to pump out news across microblogging sites and set themselves up as news providers.

The Newsweb SMS group, with no obvious traditional news credentials, sends alerts of live cricket score, news, stock market and latest happenings in the entertainment world. There are 5451 subscribers to this group.

Another similar group, called just News, has nearly 12,000 subscribers.

Some journalists are in on the act. A reporter in North East India is offering breaking news from his small town on smsgupshup.com. A news site in the eastern State of Orissa is offering breaking news via the same site and is one of the largest being followed with over 26,000 subscribers.

Other players have jumped in to offer mobile blogging services. Besides smsgupshup and vakow, other players are ActivMobs, and MyToday MOBS.

Reliance Mobile, the second largest mobile service provider, offers mobile blogging to cater for users that want to exchange short messages and who, on-the-whole, are just as happy to get fast-action, bite-sized chunks of news for things like cricket and entertainment from non-professionals.

Despite the range of voices, languages and the obvious thirst for citizen journalism no large newspaper has yet opened up a unique platform take advantage of the potential for citizen journalists in India.

Big papers flash mobile numbers and email addresses where readers can send in stories but they take their interaction with the readers no further. Television, however, is really getting in on the act.

India has more national TV news channels than any country, including the United States. The bitter competition that has ensued means that the channels go to lengths to stand out.

As a result, TV News citizen journalists are having a good run in India. Two news channels, which have adopted citizen journalism in an especially big way, are CNN-IBN and IBN 7, two sister channels from the same parent company IBN. CNN-IBN is in English and IBN7 is in Hindi.

CNN-IBN also recently spun off a CNN-IBN Forum for student citizen journalists to video and moblog. We also saw BBC launch an initiative to find citizen journalist editors for its bbcurdu.com, which offers news in Urdu language.

Another TV channel, Amrita TV in South India has launched a 90-episode reality show focused on nurturing citizen journalists.

I have left till last the two big non-newspaper sites that have tried to accommodate this thirst for citizen journalism.

Merinews.com was India’s first large citizen journalism website. Instablogs.com, which has been around since October 2005, is similar. Like, Merinews it also pays contributors, but has better design.

I would say that though. I was the founding Managing Editor.

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BBC moblog reports from international mobile conference

Oliver Luft — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:34:53 +0000

The BBC has been experimenting with filing video reports from mobile phones as part of its coverage of Mobile World Congress 2008, in Barcelona this week.

Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones explained the approach in a video post the BBC’s dot.life technology blog before the event:

Then while in Barcelona he moblogged several interviews, including one with Isabella Rossellini about making movies available for viewing on mobile phones, using the footage to augment a text story by embedding a flash player in the head of the story for a nice piece of additional story telling.

The MoJo approach is finding increasing favour with large news organisations. Reuters put mobiles in the hands of delegates at last month’s World Economic Forum in Davos.

How long will it take to trickle down into the regional press though? My guess would be 18-24 months before we see the first serious use.

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News articles today on Journalism.co.uk

Oliver Luft — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:38:33 +0000

NUJ to offer free legal support for members’ copyright actions
Deal with Thompsons Solicitors will allow members to pursue copyright infringements at no personal cost

Times Mobile appoints Brigid Callaghan as its new editor
Brigid Callaghan becomes editor of Times Mobile

Chinese digital news under attack in run-up to Olympics, says press freedoms report
Reporters Without Boarders report on press freedoms says 55 reporters and internet-users have been arrested in China since the country was awarded the Olympics

‘Local online news is changing, but not fast enough’ Paul Bradshaw
Comment article

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Breaking news from mobile to Twitter/Seesmic – perfect example of how it works

Oliver Luft — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:01:45 +0000

Possibly one of the best example of how newspaper websites aren’t tapped in at all when it comes to reporting breaking news via mobile devices.

Mark Comerford makes the point by highlighting his Twitter buddy @documentally who crashed his Landrover this morning and recorded the events on Twitter and through Seesmic. Thankfully, no-one was hurt (the vehicle has more than a few scars though) and friends on the social network were able to help provide information on recovery services.

The compelling factor was that Mark blogged all the events, linking to the Tweets and video, pretty-much in real time as things were unfolding.

Breaking news events have been documented like this before across Twitter – news groups in the US have also used the immediacy of these services to good effect, especially for last year’s fires in California – but have you ever seen a newspaper, national, regional or local, in the UK ever try this out for their rolling news stories getting people coming back again and again for updates?

Thought not.

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Jeff Jarvis on mobile journalism

Laura Oliver — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:46:38 +0000

Beet.TV has an interesting video interview with Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York journalism professor, on the advantages of mobile journalism.

In particular Jarvis has been testing out Reuters’ Nokia handsets at the recent World Economics Forum, where found practical advantages to the size of the device and the speed with which copy can be filed.

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Milwaukee Sentinel Journal shows off its video production

Laura Oliver — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:40:50 +0000

US paper the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal has produced a video for the Associated Press Photo Managers Association of exploring the Journal’s use of video online.

The footage shows the results of three professional editing suites recently installed at the Journal and the training in editing techniques received by reporters, photographers and online production staff.

From the video explanation it is clear that the Journal sees the medium as just another vehicle for storytelling – one that can, in certain news situations, be more appropriate than just text, slideshows and images.

Using footage to cover local arts news gives clarity to concepts that might be complicated by text coverage. Similarly ideas such as their technology review show are a simple way to engage on a personal level with your readers.

A surge in video on the site does not mean the paper is abandoning other reporting techniques – something that will soothe new media journalist Pat Thornton, whose latest blog post urges newspaper sites to only use video when the quality is there.

“You could have a totally modern news site without video, and video will not suddenly transform your site into something modern. Be smart with your resources, because the industry doesn’t have a lot of room for error,” warns Thornton in the post.

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