On the Go: Nic Fulton and the Mobile Journalism Toolkit
by Jenny Chowdhury 
Thanks to a collaboration between Reuters and Nokia, journalists have been using the N95 around the world, from the Edinburgh TV Festival to the US campaign trail. Learn more about the project from Nic Fulton, chief scientist of Reuters Media Division.
“Reuters’ main mission is to inform the world,” Fulton stated. To that end, one of Fulton’s key duties is heading the Reuters Lab, a showcase for Reuters’ latest product innovations and developments. With a smile, Fulton pointed to a picture of the cartoon character Dexter, a boy genius with a secret laboratory, explaining that Dexter was “someone” whom he aspires to be like. After hearing about the highly experimental nature of the Reuters Lab, it’s safe to say he’s not far off. “The really key thing about us is we’re allowed to fail. It’s actually fairly rare in business to ever be allowed to fail. But in fact there’s no way you can do anything new without failing.”
Fulton certainly has a brave, yet realistic approach to innovation. However, while he and the other members of the lab have been granted experimental allowance, they stick to an objective: “Do ten things, make four work.” The creativity and utility reflected in their products indicate that their approach works and is, in fact, sound advice for any person of the hacker/mad scientist persuasion who wants to achieve at least a modicum of success.
While Fulton spoke about several Reuters Lab projects, the highlight of his talk was the mobile journalism project. “There’s more and more demand for multimedia material, and the quality demands are kind of going down if the news worthiness is up. So one of the key things is, we need to equip our journalists with some device that is super portable, always with them, yet has the capability to do a fairly good job of capturing material. ”
The N95 was chosen to serve as the backbone to the mobile journalism toolkit. The camera could be used to capture photos and video. The built-in GPS could potentially be used to geocode media for stories. Additionally, the kit contains:
A Bluetooth keyboard to facilitate easier typing.
A tripod to keep the camera steady.
A Sony microphone for directional audio recording (designed for the toolkit).
A Basic Power Monkey to give the kit power past the phone’s own battery.
A Power Monkey Explorer with solar panels so that the kit can be charged in sunny environments.
You can see the entire toolkit here.
The software for the kit was also developed to cater to the way journalists work. “You can enter a text description, you can add photos and videos and effectively build up a multimedia story,” explained Fulton. Once the media is uploaded, it is published into a WordPress-based application that has plug-ins to alert editors of new stories in the queue. “We’ve basically put together a basic but functioning sort of end-to-end publishing system for our journalists.”
A few Reuters journalists have received the Mobile Journalism kits and have tested them out during Nokia World, New York Fashion Week, US campaign trail events, Gadgetoff 2007 and more. The footage from these trials is posted here.
From the 1-2 sentence maximum for most entries, it seems that the journalist were less inclined to break out their keyboard peripherals than to use the phone’s built-in camera and texting capabilities. Additionally, while the photos were great, some of the videos indicated that journalists were still getting the hang of shooting with the N95. Nic Fulton’s video was much steadier than most of the others, probably because he is the most practiced participant.
While the type of media produced so far with the kit may not resemble the look and feel of traditional media outlets, it seems to indicate that traditional media may be going in a more progressive direction. The kit seems like a perfect fit for citizen journalism, the process where citizens collect and report news. Citizen journalism, a type of participatory media, has been on the rise with the development of more advanced mobile devices and increasingly ubiquitous Internet availability. At any rate, it seems that the ideal use for the mobile journalism toolkit will emerge somewhere along the burgeoning convergence of traditional and citizen journalism.
You can read more about what Reuters is doing in this space at Nic Fulton’s blog and at Reuters Lab.
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