In 2008 John D. McHugh, Frontline Club award winner, was commissioned by the Guardian to produce an online report on ‘Six months in Afghanistan’, using photography, short films, audio slideshows and blogging.
Tonight he will talk about and showcase some of his work for the project. Full details of the event can be read at this link.
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. Iām 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! š
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.
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.