Ladies and Gentlemen: it is now possible to leap to the forefront of journalism with technology available on the street. This is moblogging. The future is now.
Sort of.
Whoever thought of this was on to something when he or she decided to hire journalism students to use camera phones and the Internet as a nouveau wire service on the cheap. The idea was to be able to capture the ambiance of a political convention by assembling a mosiac of grainy images of the events via the camera phone. The images would give the viewer a near-real-time sense of the convention, taking advantange of the fast upload capabilities of the phone without the need to download images to a computer to edit or send. We would be a swarm of imagetakers and reporters, filing a photo every ten minutes on average, for the entire convention. Our editing team at the University of South Carolina’s Newsplex would edit our pictures and text, and receive dictation for longer stories, and post them to the moblog.
In practice, this operation worked only somewhat. The problems:
The picture quality is pretty poor, unless the light is optimal. Optimal light will not be had while indoors or at night with people and police running around. There’s no zoom lens, so you have to get really close to your subject, which might not be possible. There’s a delay of a few seconds on picture saving so you can’t take rapid-fire pictures.
We found it difficult to shoot some pictures, then take a time-out to jam out a sentence on the keypad. Typing any text of length on a numerical pad is s-l-o-w. Even with intelligent text, where the phone anticipates the end of your word as you type it in, it takes a long time to type even a picture cutline. It would take 20-30 minutes to file a paragraph. Next time, train the reporters better in filing stories efficiently, and the editors in handling the workload.
A moblogging operation should be taken as seriously, and as with as many resources and people, as a regular news operation. For example, ideally we could send in a pic w/ a slug, then call the Newsplex and dictate a short paragraph description. But you can’t dictate something when no one is on the other end of the phone call, as happened frequently when we called the Newsplex. It would take a number of editors working nonstop to handle all the dispatches.
It is also simply difficult to leave the scene of a story or step aside for a few minutes to file something. Tuesday night, I found myself swept along a crowd of marching protesters while trying to file a picture on the phone. Not the easiest thing in the world to do.
At times we all dumped pictures in the moblog at once, but nobody edited for content. Thursday morning, all the reporters happened to photograph the presidential motorcade blocking Manhattan streets for an hour. That motorcade was the most covered event of the convention, as far as the moblog was concerned – several pages were taken up by motorcade pictures. There could have been some filtering of redundant pictures by an editor.
Moblogging is suitable for breaking news or events with good visual images. It is not good for in-depth stories, because then you are limited by the time it takes to type in a story and the built-in word limit on these messages. You have to dictate longer stories, which takes more time and resembles more the regular print news operation, or a wire service.
Our Cingular Wireless moblog did have a good list of Web resources for more information. But I thought the layout was confusing in that the story threads – the text on the upper left column which categorizes the images, are not as prominent as they should be. If the viewer simply goes through the images on the homepage, which come in the order uploaded, he/she will see a jumbled, unsorted bunch of pictures. There must be another way to organize the images, because there ARE hundreds of them.
Small point: At the bottom of the screen is a list of numbers that link to sequential pages of images, and it always goes to 20. Now, most of the time there weren’t more pages to show, and if you click on a higher number, it shows a blank page. This could turn a user off and have them flee our site.