Mobile Media Toolkit

For Professional Journalists:

For journalists, the Creating Content sections of the Mobile Media Toolkit will answer your questions about why mobiles are a valuable tool for the professional journalist, as well as provide examples of how and where different tools are being used around the world.

The life of the journalist is fast-paced; for breaking news, there is a need to capture and share information quickly and accurately. Mobiles are a portable, unobtrusive way to record video and audio, track location, and communicate with sources and media organizations. Journalists can use video-enabled mobiles to film in places where camera crews are banned, or use mobile phones to record sources who might otherwise be uncomfortable with a full recording set up. Plus, with a mobile, journalists can be ready to report the news wherever it happens, without depending on computers or cameras. Location-based mobile tools can help reporters reach more specific audiences. Many mobile Internet users are searching for information relevant to their current situation, meaning that hyper-local reports are highly sought after. The Mobile Media Toolkit can help journalists choose the right phone and applications to make the best possible reports.

So how can journalists get the most out of the Mobile Media Toolkit? Within these pages you’ll find examples of tools being used by reporters in the field, and information on how those tools can help in your reporting. The sidebar has links to examples of tools in action and descriptions of the best tools so that you’ll know what to use in any situation. Reporters with the right phone and right tools can change the way they capture and share news and information.

The following articles are applicable to journalists who want to report from the field, as well as for untrained reporters who want to be engaged as citizen journalists:

• Creating Content/Photographs and Creating Content/Audio:  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.

In addition, professional journalists may want to look at articles aimed at citizen journalists. These articles are about sharing content from your mobile phone to the web. Professional journalists may be interested in self-publishing for private journalistic reasons (keeping a personal blog, for example) or for experimentation and inspirational purposes.

• 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.