Journalists came together at the Frontline Club last week to discuss mobile journalism today and in the future.
The panel debate covered most of the ongoing issues surrounding mobile journalism, from the role a device plays in the image of a journalist to the debate over how such content should be used by ‘professional’ video journalists. Journalism.co.uk caught up with the panel (Louis Gump, CNN; Andy Dickinson University of Central Lancashire; Alex Wood, Not on the Wires; and Jonathan Hewett, City University) at the end of the debate to talk more.
Note: Due to technical problems during recording some audio is reduced quality.
Journalists from across all media platforms came together at the Frontline Club last night to discuss the impact of mobile on the newsroom and the wider media world.
“Mobile is as different to online as television is to radio,” CNN’s vice-president of mobile Louis Gump told the Frontline audience.
In the beginning people took someone who was sitting in the radio studio and put a camera on it. Then realised they didn’t have to do it that way. I think that’s what happening now.
He told Journalism.co.uk that the near future of mobile content needs to look at original content, rather than just using it as a new platform for existing material.
The biggest change I think will happen at CNN over the next two years is we are going to start creating content just for mobile devices. Right now most of what you see on a mobile from CNN you can also find on other platforms, but we will have more original programming.
The panel debate covered most of the ongoing issues surrounding mobile journalism, from the role a device plays in the image of a journalist to the debate over how such content should be used by ‘professional’ video journalists. Andy Dickinson, course leader of BA Digital Journalism Production at University of Central Lancashire, said it was a “mistake” to expect large news organisations to adopt the same production processes as smaller outlets.
I think it is a mistake to always be talking about what’s happening outside mainstream media, it won’t work for us. We can’t do it because of our agenda and personal and professional things get in the way of that. Now and then our big spotlight will land on it. But citizen journalism is not there to replace, it’s there to amplify.
Gump agreed, saying that the rise of citizen journalism “increases the value” of professional journalists, by “filling in the gaps”, but would not be a replacement: “We are still telling the hard news, [citizen journalism] enriches the overall offering”. Alex Wood, freelance mobile journalist and co-founder of Not on the Wires, added that mobiles were simply another platform to leverage the story. But he said in his own work, such as when he organised mass coverage of the G20 summit by mobile phones, the journalistic talent still had to shine through.
I always try to keep the integrity of the story and still worked very hard to make it journalistic. People tend to obsess about technology being one thing after another. Why not use your mobile phone to do your vox pops. There’s nothing wrong with you then putting that into a more traditional package. It’s another tool in the ever expanding toolkit that journalists have now. We can still take things from broadcast, for example framing a good shot and having good audio. Let’s go back to the basics but use them in the new technology.
He added that as a journalist using user generated content, old rules of fact-checking must still apply.
People can manipulate technology very easily and its still a worry. Journalists still need to pick up the phone and speak to the person if they have submitted media. We should always keep to those standards.
Jonathan Hewett, director of the newspaper journalism course at City University, agreed: “We are not going to chuck out the old stuff and forget the valuable lessons”. Prompting Dickinson to respond: “There’s a killer app on your phone that will allow you to check if something is right. It’s called your phone.”
Hewett said mobile has created opportunities for newspapers who do not have the visual reputation of a broadcaster, but more needs to be done.
Newspapers have been slower to catch up with more innovative stuff, but they are getting to realise mobile reporting is one way where a newspaper website can be different. It isn’t too fussed about quality of footage (…) We are still at early stage with mobiles full stop. We need to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Wood commented near the end of the panel debate that he wanted to see more innovation from iPad apps, which he claimed had so far been “disappointing”, telling Journalism.co.uk to expect to see some exciting stuff from him in the near future.
CNN also announced the launch of a new international iPhone app featuring their iReport platform at the event. See our report here, and catch up with tweets from the event with the #cnnfrontline hashtag.
The Twitter career graveyard has begun slowly filling up. News today that CNN’s senior editor for middle east affairs has been sacked after 20 years with the company for voicing what was deemed to be an inappropriate sentiment via Twitter. Octavia Nasr publicly mourned the death of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.
Parisa Khosravi, CNN’s vice-president international newsgathering, said in a statement that Nasr’s credibility had been compromised.
Deveny defended herself, claiming that Twitter was like “passing notes in class, but suddenly these notes are being projected into the sky and taken out of context. Twitter is online graffiti, not a news source.”
“Wrong,” said the Age technology editor, “posts to Twitter are not private messages”.
Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan lost his job during this year’s general election campaign after what the Times called a “spectacular ‘Twitter suicide’”. MacLennan reportedly called the elderly “coffin dodgers,” before moving on to some more colourful language:
He had also labelled the Commons Speaker John Bercow a “t**”, David Cameron a “t***” and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, “a b******”.
CNN has announced that it will no longer use content (stories, video and photographs) from the Associated Press (AP), “ending a business relationship that had been in place since the cable network’s inception”.
Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide, said in a memo to employees that the decision to discontinue the network’s use of the wire service was part of a strategy to “more fully leverage CNN’s global newsgathering investments.”
“We will no longer use AP materials or services,” Walton wrote. “The content we offer will be distinctive, compelling and, I am proud to say, our own.”
It is to use Reuters to supplement its breaking news coverage. While cutting the deal with AP will save CNN money, Walton claimed it was only “partly a business decision”.
It looks like the two channels have quite different priorities. CNN goes for Tiger Woods and the iPad, while Al Jazeera puts the Wikileaks story top of its page.
MSNBC has “indefinitely” suspended its news anchor David Shuster for filming a new pilot for CNN, Huffington Post (and others) report.
Schuster had also got into trouble for a tweet sent to the conservative activist James O’Keefe in January; it was deemed “inappropriate” by the channel, adds HuffPo.
BBC News Online was initially devised in 1997 as a response to CNN’s online news page, claims its creator and former Editor-in-Chief, Mike Smartt.
“The reason that the BBC decided to go online was that CNN went online in 1996. And because the BBC doesn’t do anything in a hurry, it took it a very long time to actually make the decision.”
Speaking at the University of Coventry as part of its ‘Coventry Conversations’ series, Smartt told of the early days of online news and the difficulties faced by both designers and journalists.
Online journalism had to wait for technology to permit it to expand to its full potential, he said. Deadlines were demolished and journalists were regularly spending over half an hour to write a code with their story, only to have to go back again when a space, comma or any other character wasn’t in place.
The BBC were very wary of going online at first, Smartt said. “Initially, in the BBC, the journalists rejected the idea for two reasons: the money that was used to finance it was obviously coming from radio and television, so there was some resentment, and the internet was seen, amongst the people in the more traditional media, as competition,” he confessed.
When they did push ahead with the idea, experience was obviously thin on the ground. “My only qualification was that I used one of these” he said, showing a picture of his laptop back in 1997. The initial website was running from a server similar both in size and internal technology to his original laptop, he said. “Actually, for three weeks when we first launched the server, big in theory, … looked like this, that’s what we served News Online from, for three weeks, in the corner of the Newsroom.”
He also spoke of the problem of deciding what a story should look like online, whether going on the internet meant that people were looking for “three Ceefax sentences” or something more in-depth. The BBC’s 1996 ‘Online News Concept’ outlined goals that are beginning to be met only recently: valuable text, high-quality pictures that load fast, high-quality audio, full screen videos and full interactivity.
The content of the first test pages was mostly made up of jokes, but the team, led by Smartt, had to redesign the site again and again until the first BBC News Online page was finally agreed upon. He showed one version of the front page with a lively design and a high number of images, but explained why they couldn’t go with it: “If you remember back then you had dial-up, and you literally rang them up, and then this sound came along, and then you were connected, and only later up came the site, very, very slowly.”
Smartt finished with a warning to those who are not prepared to embrace new forms of journalism: “If you can’t handle multi-media, and you will have to in future, you are doomed in this business.”
Dr Sanjay Gupta is CNN’s chief medical correspondent, but also a practising neurosurgeon. This means that during CNN’s coverage of the Haitian earthquake and its aftermath Gupta has been reporting from the field, but also filmed performing surgery and working in an emergency medical clinic.
Today’s Connect the World show on CNN will explore the issues this raises from whether journalists can/should be part of a story to whether Gupta can carry out his role as a doctor and a journalist at the same time without undermining either position. The show airs at 9pm (GMT).
A week on since a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, how are news websites covering the story? What tools are being used and how are media organisations helping those affected with information on top of news for a wider audience?
Here’s a selection of sites that have made the most of multimedia tools to break and roll reports of the crisis. Please add your own examples in the comment space below or email Journalism.co.uk.
Unsurprisingly, the earthquake took out all the landline and mobile phone lines in Haiti immediately. This obviously disabled the country spectacularly – as well as the pressing issue of not being able to speak to each other, it meant that Haitians were not able to speak to the rest of the world. As a result, the classic ways of gathering information for a rolling news channel – call everyone we know and find out what’s happening – were redundant. We had a map, and that was it.
Twitter, Google Chat, Skype and Facebook were used to contact sources and conduct interviews; while YouTube and searches of TwitPic provided on-the-ground footage. These tools were being picked up by the entire newsroom, Purser tells us, not just the online team. What’s more the geography of the newsroom (the online desk is right next to the studio floor, for example) helped grow the story across platforms, she adds.
Macguire describes how some of the first video footage of the disaster was sent back to London by a Reuters’ videographer thanks to a “friendly embassy” in Port au Prince with an internet connection.
Helping to find the missing
Online news coverage and multimedia from Haiti has been used to locate missing persons by relatives. CNN in particular is using its citizen journalism site iReport to help connect people with family, friends and loved ones in Haiti.
An ‘assignment’ on the iReport site asks users to submit photos of missing people, including their last name, first name, age, city and any other significant details. So far, 6,753 iReports have been sent in for this assignment.
“We are also in the process of integrating incoming e-mails, phone calls to CNN and tweets to the #haitimissing hashtag,” a CNN spokesman said – helping individuals conduct a wider search for information about missing loved ones.
“Since the earthquake hit, the Impact Your World page has had an increase of 7,545 per cent in page views over the previous week. The site lists opportunities to donate via phone, text and website, with special sections devoted to texting and international currencies.”
Social media coverage and real-time tools Digiphile blog has a great round-up of this, but Twitter lists have been used extensively by news organisations to group together twitters and correspondents on-the-ground in Haiti.
Elsewhere the New York Times is bolstering its main news channel coverage of Haiti by using its The Lede blog to provide rolling coverage. The blog is updating with links to reports from other news sources as well as the Times’ own coverage and has posts filed under different days stretching back to when the earthquake occurred. The aggregation of multimedia reports on the disaster available on the site’s homepage has been replicated through a Facebook page posting updates on the situation in Haiti.
In a city without electricity, with no functioning newspapers, no TV signals, no telephone lines, and cellular service so spotty that it is hardly service at all, radio stations in Haiti have become the lifeline of news about the living and dead.
(…) The station operates on two diesel generators and owner Mario Vian’s promise not to stop.
Outside.in, the US-based hyperlocal content and advertising platform, has closed a $7 million B round of financing, led by Union Square Ventures and including CNN Worldwide, the company announced yesterday. paidContent has information from its CEO and the release in full. Full post at this link…
