The Manchester Evening News‘ decision to equip some journalists with Nokia N95 handsets has started to bear fruit, as mojo (mobile journalist) Nicola Dowling captured Manchester United footballer Cristiano Ronaldo’s recent fender bender.
Dowling’s mobile pics from the scene were supplemented with some video footage, which shows just how high quality the N95 cameras are:
According to a report on HoldtheFrontPage, Dowling’s footage and images were picked up by the Sun, BBC and Sky News.
Nokia has partnered with South African media and marketing news site Bizcommunity.com to offer journalists at the title Nokia N82 phones for newsgathering.
The devices will be used to produce multimedia reports for the site using the five megapixel camera and ‘DVD-like quality video capture’, an announcement from Bizcommunity said.
The phones also feature a one-click upload function for publishing online.
Nokia has previously had its N95 model trialled by Reuters and South African journalism students.
The Nashua Telegraph is experimenting with live video from mobile phones on its website using streaming service Qik.
The Telegraph is using the tool to stream footage from N95 handsets to provide behind-the-scenes coverage of its online food show, The Doorbell Gourmet.
Qik’s popularity with publishers seems to be growing – last month the Sacramento Bee used the service to create a broadcast channel for reporters to cover protests over the Olympic torch relay.
Here’s Journalism.co.uk’s interview with Qik founder Bhaskar Roy.
UPDATE – The Telegraph has posted its first ever breaking news coverage using Qik.
Live footage of a police evacuating residents was captured using mobiles and streamed to the site using the service.
Telewaving is today launching Wavelog, an application that allows users to post multimedia content directly from Nokia mobile phones to blogs.
The Wavelog system works with s60, the software run on smart Nokia multimedia phones like the N95.
According to the developers the software, which was developed and tested on Nokia N95 mobile phones posting to the WordPress, can run on any blogging platform.
The system sounds similar to the software developed by Nokia and Reuters for their mobile journalism project.
That system allowed journalists to upload multimedia reports from their N95 phones to a back-end WordPress blog that desk editors would then have access to.
The Telewaving system is also able to upload text, images, audio, and video and is able to upload over any network connection (this may just be US networks, though).