Ahead of last week’s Circom Regional conference in Santiago de Compostela a group of young journalists from different regional stations met for a short workshop on mobile journalism led by RTÉ’s mobile journalism expert Glen Mulcahy, NRK’s John Inge Johansen (Norway), HRT’s Darko Flajpan (Croatia) and Circom’s Karol Cioma.
The participants shot and edited short ‘postcard’ packages from Santiago. I attended a session at the conference on Friday where the videos were broadcast and we heard from the journalists. The following packages stood out to me:
Patrik Samuelsson‘s video is interesting – it has lots of nice shots that really show off the range of the iPhone. Interestingly, Patrik, who is a Video Journalist at SVT (Sweden), said he got better shots with the iPhone than he would with his usual VJ kit.
I love this story from Adrian Rozenberg of TVR (Romania). What Adrian observed was that his interviewees behaved differently in front of an iPhone compared to his usual set-up. There was less of a barrier and they talked to him much more freely.
This story below was shot and edited by Nadejda Uzunova of BNT (Bulgaria). Before the course in Santiago, Nadejda had never used a camera to shoot a story nor had she edited a package. This package shows that mobile journalism is a great entry point and something that can be taught, if the participant is willing and interested, in a very short period of time.
There’s no doubt that news organisations are using mobile journalism regularly in live and breaking news situations, but what these packages show is the potential for packaging content and how accessible it can be with some focused training and the right equipment.
Sitting in the session watching the videos it also made me think about how organisations could work with the audience to grow and develop user generated content. There’s so much potential considering the huge, and ever-growing, base of smartphone owners.
All of the videos from the workshop can be found here and Glen talks a lot more about the process over on his blog here.
