Tech Notes
By Alan Abbey and Andrew Friedman Posted Jul 1 2007
Last fall when a private plane carrying New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed into a building in midtown Manhattan, the first video report on Fox TV came from a Fox cameraman who happened to be in the area on another assignment.
He ran to the scene and reported live by using a souped-up Palm Treo smartphone to transmit video to the Fox News control room. Fox relayed the grainy feed on live TV.
BBC last winter announced a project that will explore how people might use mobile devices in the future to capture and share multimedia stories. Photography students at the University of Brighton will “push the boundaries of what is possible in putting together a piece of ‘citizen journalism’ or narrative using the latest mobile phones, GPS (Global Positioning Systems) devices and multimedia data.”
For example, pictures and video captured from multiple devices around a sporting event can be mapped in time and space automatically, creating a rich view of the entire game from multiple perspectives.
It seems that expanding mobile Internet access and improving mobile Internet connectivity may lead to another media revolution.
Michael Rogers, futurist-in-residence for The New York Times and author of the industry blog, The Practical Futurist, says the mobile Internet is at the same stage the Internet itself was at 11 or 12 years ago.
“We lack good standards for delivery and advertising; there are few business models to copy at this point,” he says. “But mobile is definitely a significant part of news delivery in the future.”
Rogers points to three trends that currently define the market for mobile Internet access, all of which will gain strength in the coming years and are expected to define news delivery on the Internet.
The first trend is a demographic Rogers calls “millennials,” 10- to 29-year-olds that have grown up with the Internet and do not feel loyalty to print newspapers and magazines.
As technology develops and mobile usage of the Internet becomes more effective and useful, news and media outlets will be forced to adapt Internet models to fit the small screens of mobile devices.
Second, technologies and opportunities on the international scale for broadband wireless activity are increasing the functionality of mobile Internet access. This is especially true in Europe, where a combination of private and governmental support for advanced mobile technologies has expanded mobile connectivity and has led consumers and providers to explore effective usage of mobile Internet connectivity.
The final piece of the puzzle is the evolution of mobile devices themselves. Last year was the first in which laptop computers outsold desktop models in the U.S., a change that Rogers says foretells future developments, especially for journalists in the field.
Some of the problems that currently face mobile wireless users — namely small keyboards and screens — are already being dealt with, he says.
“In the foreseeable future, write-on screens and voice recognition technology will become both more common and more advanced, and cell phones will come equipped with LED virtual keyboards, 12-14 mega-pixel cameras, professional-quality video cameras and built-in sensors.
“Once that technology reaches a certain point, news outlets will be able to create hyper-local news Web sites with location-based advertising.”
Already, media outlets such as USA Today are employing “MOJO’s” (mobile journalists), and many media counterparts are expected to follow suit in the future. Armed with professional-quality still and video cameras, these “jack-of-all-trades” have the technology to file stories, videos and photographs directly from the field.
Will this mobile, convergance journalism possibly be the wave of the future?
The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 was a watershed in this area. An in-depth analysis of mainstream media activities in that short-lived war by former NBC correspondent Marvin Kalb, now of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said journalists employed cameras, computers, portable satellite dishes and video phones to stream reports from hotel roofs and hilltops that often revealed sensitive information to the enemy.
“Once upon a time, such information was the stuff of military intelligence acquired with considerable effort and risk; now, it has become the stuff of everyday journalism,” Kalb says. “The camera and the computer have become weapons of war.”
The report quoted Emile Nakhle, Al-Arabiya’s director of news and current affairs, describing what he termed “broadcast via broadband.”
“In places not accessible by car in the middle of conflict areas, for example, a sole reporter with a laptop and small camera can shoot, edit, feed and do live interviews,” Kalb says.
The war similarly kicked forward efforts by bloggers and other citizen journalists to advance their stories and agendas without mainstream media filtering. Well-known Israel-based blogger Lisa Goldman called it “the most blogged war,” a tag that received wide play.
Israelis and Lebanese were writing, often in real time, on events literally in their backyards before it was available on mainstream media.
Yet the overall quality of the citizen-produced content during the war was uneven, at best.
A search for “Israel-Hezbollah-Lebanon-war” on YouTube returns more than 2,600 videos (with varying spellings of the word Hezbollah), most of which are related to the summer conflict, but only a few of which shed new light on that event.
Some amateur videos do provide real-time, if low quality, footage of missile attacks on both Lebanese and Israeli targets and capture graphic sights and sounds not usually shown on commercial media.
There is an interesting video of a supposed Israel Defense Forces interrogation of a Hezbollah terrorist that may or may not be authentic.
Yet most of the products on YouTube’s shelves are either rehashed from professional (and traditional) sources such as TV news reports, amateur propaganda demonizing either Israel or Hezbollah, fluff unrelated to the search topic or of little interest.
There are 40 posts of left-wing British MP George Galloway’s comments in support of Hezbollah on SkyNews (posted by left-wing supporters trying to highlight Galloway’s views and right-wing opponents trying to “out” the outspoken activist). They include a tselection titled “Israel – 1967 – The Six-Day War,” a video slide show called “Facts about Lebanon and Israel that the Media Isn’t Telling” and a trailer for “Obsession,” a documentary subtitled “Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”
In addition, there are more than a dozen clips of some Australian guy speaking his mind into a home video camera. His “analysis” of France’s call for an Israeli withdrawal includes the following gem: “F***ing French, seriously… F*** ‘em, they’ve got trouble. He blames rival videographers for using voluptuous women to boost ratings: “(Our rankings) could have been higher if we would have got some skanky b**** saying, ‘I’ve really got nothing to say, but look at me! I’ve got tits!’ F***in’ hell, 200,000 people click on some stupid bitch who’s got nothing to say.”
“Look,” says Rogers, “some people will always make a business out of sensationalism, but there is also a market for well-researched, substantial information. That’s not going to change, regardless of technology.”
A study in heavily mobile-technology-concentrated Finland — home to Nokia — indicated the direction mobile media content might go. Respondents said they want weather, traffic, direct connection to an emergency center, news, sports results, movie information, book reviews, music, free time happenings, bus and train timetables, maps, ads, commercial services such as online shops, open hours of brick-and-mortar stores and more.
The media — traditional, new generation, citizen-generated or commercial — that delivers these goods will prosper in the new media world.