Mobile phones are fast becoming the technology of choice for the mobile journalists, aka MoJo.

Once loaded with heavy and bulky equipment, Mojo’s can simply carry a mobile phone and perhaps a wireless keyboard to report and file a story on location.

It also might be less intimidating or conspicuous when travelling overseas – especially useful when reporting on war stories.

The Nokia N95 is one of these useful tools and Reuters is one of the media outlets taking advantage of this mobile phone technology.

Their toolkit consists of includes the Nokia N95/N82, a Bluetooth keyboard, a digital microphone and a phone-adapted tripod.

Robert Scoble, a Californian blogger, has been broadcasting live video from his mobile phone through the video streaming site Qik.

Scoble said that he “can get live video onto the Internet faster than [he] can make a phone call.”

However, there is one downfall to all this data streaming to the internet.

Other countries like the UK and US have mobile phone packages that allow for unlimited data packages, but unfortunately Australia does not have that luxury.

However, unless phone companies allow cheaper data packages for mobiles, journalists using internet technology on mobiles may not be the option for cost-cutting media corporations.

Here is a picture of the Reuters toolkit:

* This picture was taken from http://crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/reuters.jpg

As Jennifer Woodard Maderazo explains in her article “5 Videoblogs that do it right”, getting your hands on video equipment and uploading to the web has never been cheaper or easier than before. It is no wonder that people are using video to help tell their story.

However, unless you have been living under a rock you would have heard of the infamous YouTube, famous for many vlogs. But what exactly is a vlog?

Maderazo explains that, “it’s hard to classify vlogs.” She is right.

Trying to Google the precise definition of a vlog is hard because it could be a number of things.

A vlog could be just like a diary or opinion such as Chris Crocker’s cry for Britney, but then again others could be something you would expect on a television program such as a war report in Iraq.

I think vlogs are a great idea, especially when it comes to explaining things.

Just last week I was going to buy a new mobile phone. There were two phones I was particularly interested in – the Nokia N95 and the iPhone. I did not know which to purchase so I actually used a review on a vlog to decide what was right for me.

People are obviously more inclined to be interested in watching video, rather than reading through slabs of information to gain some knowledge. I think video blogs are the future of reporting anything on the net, especially if people want hits on their videos.

*** By the way, I ended up choosing the Nokia N95 – it had a 5-megapixel camera, perfecting for clubbing! Here’s the review which made me choose it over the iPhone:

However it seems that interactivity and the 24/7 world is changing the presentation news.

Steve Garfield, a Mobile Video Journalist, explained how easy it was to use mobile technology to broadcast news straight to the web – no need to wait.

See here to watch the video:

Mr Garfield explained that he approached Duncan Hunter, a US politician running for the 2008 Republican nomination for President, whilst downtown. Mr Hunter allowed Garfield to film him and ask a few questions since he was only recording him from a mobile phone.

Duncan Hunter blurted out that he was not ready to quit running for the nomination and gave Garfield an exclusive for the streaming site Qik!

Obviously, the mobile phone was not as intimidating as a TV news camera. It is amazing that the CEO did not trust the ‘traditional media’ yet could trust someone using a smaller device.

This new form of reporting by streaming live from mobile is great because print is one-dimensional and is often a day late. If news happens now, people want to hear it now, not tomorrow.

This week I had at look at the variety of free photo gallery editors that were reviewed by the Online Journalism Review.

They were looking for one that would work best for a start-up or small-scale news website. SlideFlickr, BubbleShare, PictureTrail and Picasa were all tested and tried, but the people at OJR decided that Google-owned Picasa was the victor.

So I decided to try out Picasa to see if it was really a winner.

After waiting for it to download, and waiting for it to sort through my entire computer for my photo files, I was a bit confused about what to do next.

How did I get it from there to uploading my photos onto the web? Perhaps it should have come with easier instructions.

But after some guess work and help from the OJR’s review, I found out how to add captions and place it into my blog.

I do not think it was as user-friendly as the Online Journalism Review suggested it would be, but it is a great way to make ordinary pictures more interesting through a slideshow.

It was also relatively fast to make a photo gallery.

These are the links to these photo gallery tools:

http://www.slideflickr.com/

http://www.bubbleshare.com/

http://www.picturetrail.com/

http://picasaweb.google.com/

This small photo gallery is of my cat Tiki:

This is my response to the YouTube video Kevin Sites in the hot zone: interview (YouTube video above) & the week six reading New Tools.

Kevin Site is currently a Yahoo! News correspondent who was working as a solo journalist whilst covering about 22 war zones in a year.

Site, whom has said to have pioneered solo journalism, done a lot of war reporting in that year – about two per month!

Whilst he was covering the “hot zones” whilst with the NBC, a video filmed by him shows an US Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi.

However, due to time limitations he felt that the video and the real side of the story needed to be clarified. This encouraged him to present his side of the story through a blog.

Site suggests that blogs and internet news provide new dimensions to the world of news.

They now offer not just one medium of news, but elements of video, text and still picture.

However, Site suggests there is a possibility for more confusion.

Blogs have been used for astro-turfing where brands are secretly promoting a product in disguise of a happy customer.

But now there are more ways then ever to present a blog.

Moblogs (mobile phones sending a message to their website), podcasting and video blogs (vlogs) are just some of the new tools that people can send their message across.

Websites such as YouTube (www.youtube.com) and podcasting places such as iTunes (www.apple.com/itunes) offer a chance for people to express their thoughts or even watch television episodes.

Personally, one of the most hilarious Vlogs I have seen is also one the most popular on YouTube. Watch it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWSjUe0FyxQ

(It is of course the infamous Chris Crocker!)

This blog is based on: 

Chapter 7: “OhmyNews in South Korea” in Asia’s Media Innovators, Konrad Adenaueur Foundation, Singapore & the YouTube Clip above

According to a segment on the Listening Post on YouTube, 89 per cent of households in South Korea have broadband compared to just 50 per cent of households in the US.

In fact, according to this weeks reading, South Korea has the world’s highest number of broadband connections per capita.

The internet is interactive and more people are telling their stories and blogging online. Therefore, it would make sense to have a news site based on citizen journalism.

 The founder and CEO of OhMyNews, Oh Yeon-ho, did just that.

He used the idea that “every citizen is a reporter” to launch OhMyNews.com in South Korea, a website that publishes citizen journalism.

What I do not understand is how this website did not fall into the pitfalls of just being another news outlet, especially with the large array of media available to the South Koreans.

However, it seems that Oh’s intention of creating the site to “change society” and “…wasn’t created just for money” has attracted people to report the news.

It could also be because of the country’s history with media censorship and reporters arrests that the country was in need of news based website such as OhMyNews.

OhMyNews.com was launched in February 2000 and already boasts 60,000 citizen reporters worldwide. That is amazing!

It is good to see that Oh wants to combine the best of both traditional and citizen journalism.

The internet is a place of interaction and OhMyNews offers this chance for people to interact – to contribute to the world of news.

Nevertheless, it seems that OhMyNews are doing something to stop the perceived idea that citizen journalism is unprofessional.

Most of the 200 stories submitted each day are not published due to bad sentence structure, deemed as not newsworthy or have to be checked first for legitimacy.

But I do not think that it is the money that attracts people to become a citizen journalist.

OhMyNews only offers up to US $50 for a main top story.

While fifty-dollars does not does not seem that much, publishers are also scanning the site for regular contributors, which could be worth while in the end.

This is my response to the readings of Chris Anderson and Fred Wilson on WIRED.

Email, games, news, videos and even the chance to have your own webpage (Myspace and Facebook) are all free thanks to the growth of the internet.

Now there are even music artists, such as Radiohead, that are telling people to download their music online and to pay however much they want for the album.

I am sure most loyal fans will pay some amount, but some people would obviously not pay a cent.

Even rock legend Gene Simmons from KISS, criticised Radiohead for giving away their music (See this story on what Gene Simmons plans to do – http://www.aol.com.au/celebrity/story/radiohead-blasted-by-veteran-rockers-kiss-for-giving-their-music-away-for-free/604011/index.html .)

While it seems like there are so many free things on the internet, it looks like the advertisers and sellers are taking advantage of this. Chris Anderson calls this the “third-party system.”

It is essentially where the advertisers are paying the publishers or the websites for the audience.

However, even with newspapers, they do not make profit from the actual cost of the newspaper.

Most of their revenue comes from advertising.

It is the same with free-to-air TV.

However, newspapers will obviously not get the same amount of revenue online from an advertiser than if it was in print.

When I think of what a media business model online is, I suppose I think of the advertising that you can find on a typical webpage.

The banner-ads and the annoying pop-ups.

However, when I was reading the article by Fred Wilson, I was surprised to see that there was such a big list of different ways to make money on the internet.

It is more than just advertisements – but even licensing and sale of information about the websites users.

Response to reading “User-generated content and the changing news cycle” by Stephen Quinn & Deidre Quinn-Allan.

Newspapers were once the only source for news to the public other than town gossip.

Radio was the next news medium introduced around the 1920’s, followed by the television in the 1960’s.

Of course, the 1956 Olympics was the main influence that was behind the introduction of television to Australia.

As the news cycle evolved, newspapers were no longer the medium that was making the most of the headlines – it was simply reflecting on news items and perhaps going into more detail and analysis.

That’s not to say that newspapers are not breaking news stories, but more often than not the internet is the one delivering news first.

Mike Game, chief operating officer at Fairfax Digital, noted how people were turning to the internet for breaking news.

Let’s face it, it’s faster, cheaper and far more convenient.

Nevertheless, the internet does not mean the death of newspapers.

Even though the reading states “…in the past decade alone… consumption of Australian newspapers has dropped 20 per cent for Monday-to-Friday editions,” research conducted by New Matilda in February 2005 discovered that their online subscribers regularly read two newspapers as well as two other types of publications.

However, newspapers are also combating this decline but making an online news site. Look at The Washington Post or The Age online for example.

Remember the song Video killed the radio star by The Buggles? Well, the radio is still around, and I think that the newspaper will also be around for many years to come.

There is no doubt that journalists are under more pressure than ever to meet deadlines because of the growing popularity of online news.

However, time is not only a problem for journalists.

As Quinn notes, “time is becoming more scarce than money.”

The internet is becoming the most quickest and convenient opinion to obtain the latest news headlines at the click of a mouse – and for free.

While this may not necessarily mean the death of the newspaper, people who are on the go or at work might find online news the easiest opinion than a bulky newspaper.

Of course, online reading can lead to sore eyes and the leisurely benefits of reading the morning newspaper, personally, cannot be beaten.

However, technology is not only changing the way that people obtain their news but also how news is gathered.

No longer, do reports need bulky equipment and a large camera crew.

The future is in the lone journalist with a single piece of equipment.

Blackberries, PDA’s and even mobile phones are helping cut down the bulk.

A phone such as the Nokia N95 is capable of taking quality pictures and sending emails from reporters directly to the editors’ desk, ready to be published.

Reuters has even equipped its journalists with a mobile phone kit that includes a keyboard, microphone and tripod.

Now journalists are expected to be multi-skilled and born here is the VJ (Video journalist).

Quinn suggests that the VJ is just a single person in the field who reports, shoots, writes, edits, and transmits stories.

The industry is calling for journalists to be multi-skilled in all fields of journalism especially writing for online.

Being a journalist that specialises in only one medium of journalism such as print will soon realise that they are about to be extinct.

This article on the Inquirer.net highlights why journalists should be multi-skilled:

<http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/infotech/view/20080713-148209/Journalists-have-to-be-multi-skilled-open-to-change–Prieto>

* I obtained this picture from this website:

http://www.personalizemedia.com/media/converge_full.jpg

(http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/)

In Stevens’ website, she outlines the process of creating of multimedia story.

Stevens defines a multimedia story as a “combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a website.”

It seems that most newspapers are also moving their content online offering a multimedia experience for people to use.

For instance, the Geelong Advertiser’s online website (www.geelongadvertiser.com.au) offers all of what Steven suggested a multimedia story comprises of, even though the Geelong Advertiser started as a regional newspaper.

Stevens’ multimedia website, The Dancing Rocks of Death Valley (http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/examples/rocks/), is an example of a website that used elements of video, text and photographs in order to make the website livelier.

Stevens said that “most multimedia stories require that the reporter go into the field to report the story face-to-face with sources, rather than doing a story entirely by telephone.” 

For reporters, and also myself, covering a story that allowed a chance to video or record an event or conversation sounds far more interesting that to do a basic interview with someone over the phone!

I think that by offering the elements of a multimedia website, news based sites will become more interesting and perhaps draw in more visitors to their website allowing people to read the news that they might miss out by not buying the daily newspaper.