Mobile Media Toolkit

For Media Development Organizations and NGOs:

For media development organizations and NGOs supporting free and independent media, new media  and the use of mobile devices in supporting a free and independent media is of growing interest.

Mobile phones are everywhere, and dominate as a source for media consumption and production. Incorporating new media and mobile technology can be confusing to organizations large and small. There is a lot of content available. And because the tech changes so rapidly, support organizations have trouble keeping up.

MobileActive.org has produced the Mobile Media Toolkit to aggregate and explain the wealth of information about mobiles in media. As a media development organization, this Toolkit will help you make sense of this changing, growing field of mobiles in media and incorporate into your work supporting independent media, and in your outreach, and training.

What can you do to help with the Mobile Media Toolkit? As a media development organization, you can help us share Toolkit content with your larger constituencies in the following ways.

• Share this content internally and to your larger networks and constituencies.
• Have your trainers and speakers use the Toolkit content as a training material. Use it  in your trainings and workshops for journalists and activists on how to use their mobile phones as recording devices for mixed media and as a production device.
• Build training modules, and share your experiences and content with us!
• Experiment with the tools and let us know what works, what doesn’t.
• Tell us what else would you like to see in terms of content and materials!
• Are you an international organization with translation capabilities Help us translate the Toolkit content. For now, the entire Toolkit is available in 3 languages: English, Spanish, and Arabic. We are currently working on Russian translation. 

So how can media development organizations get the most out of the Mobile Media Toolkit? Within these pages you will find examples of tools being used in the field, and how organizations and media companies adopted and trained people to use those tools.

The following articles are applicable to media development organizations that hold workshops or training that help professional journalists, citizen reporters, media activists learn how to incorporate mobile phones into their outreach and work. Here are articles you can reference for training people how to create content:

• Creating Content/Photographs: Selecting the right camera for taking photographs or recording audio, recording high-quality material, editing photographs or audio, and publishing the content online.
• Creating Content/Video: Selecting the right camera for video recording, recording high-quality video, streaming video directly from your mobile phone, editing video right on the phone or on the computer, dealing with formatting issues, and publishing content online.
• Creating Content/Location: Tools for adding location to content while creating it on a mobile phone, why and how location-tagged content can be used to produce interesting reports, and usage of social media services to display location-tagged contents yourself.
• Creating Content/Smartphone: Tools for reporting from a smartphone--ranging from semi-live and live reporting, using microblogging tools for fast reporting, video streaming, editing multimedia content, and listings of journalism apps based on platform.

Here are articles you can adopt for trainings on how to share content via mobile phone. This has application for professional reporters, citizen journalists, and human rights activists:

• Sharing Content/Blogs: Blogs and content-management systems are powerful systems for publishing web sites. This article shows the tools journalists and citizen journalists can use to set up blogs and more complicated websites that interact well with mobile phones--so the mobile phones can be used for uploading content.
• Sharing Content/Microblogs: Twitter has shown that microblogging is an extremely important platform for journalism. This article shows journalists and citizen journalists how to microblog with their phones.
• Sharing Content/Multimedia: Mobile phones are very powerful devices for capturing multimedia content, and this article is all about how to upload that multimedia content to the web.
• Creating Content/Smartphone: Tools for reporting from a smartphone--ranging from semi-live and live reporting, using microblogging tools for fast reporting, video streaming, editing multimedia content, and listings of journalism apps based on platform.
• Security Issues: a set of primers for citizen journalists using mobile phones to begin to understand the potential security concerns, as well as some tools that may help protect them from those concerns