Pimp Our Reporters

Just about once a week, I make a call to Jonathan Kealing up at the newsroom about something I've seen or noticed around town that may be newsworthy. It could be the first time I saw a gas station that went over $3 a gallon or when I saw a man in a bunny costume running around the library. Just something that you can't see on a newsroom board or hear on the police scanner. What I would have given to have been able to take a quick picture of what I saw and send it instantly to Kealing, seeing if he wanted to run it at the last minute or as some means to fill space in his paper. That's why I think every reporter for KUJH and the Kansan should have a Motorola RAZR v3x.

Now, I'm sure this sounds excessive and that I'm just trying to get free cell phones for students. But hear me out. They have 2 mega-pixel cameras built in to them with 8x zoom, which from what I understand is more than enough to produce a newspaper or internet quality picture. Also, they have two-way video calling which means I could witness something, record it and send it to the newsroom in the matter of a minute or so. How great would this be for reporters writing on deadlines if they could literally send in their work right after it happened instead of having to drive back to campus, find a parking spot (which may be the worst part about the whole current state of being a reporter), trudge up a hill in the rain to the newsroom and then have to find one of the few computers that actually work and aren't occupied? This makes it all easier. If these phones were leased out to reporters every semester (where the student agrees to pay most of the bill), reporting would be a whole lot more efficient. Plus, it would keep us editors happy, knowing that we could track down our sometimes-delinquent reporters more easily.

I know this sounds far-fetched. I don't expect it to ever happen. But there is something to be said about instilling a more citizen-journalist mindset into our reporters. So often people in the newsroom are asking about story ideas. Where can we find fresh ideas? Where is news happening? What is newsworthy? Of course those questions are coming up. My answer is: You're sitting in a newsroom, for crying out loud. Get out. See what's happening.

And I think that equipping our reporters with something like the RAZR would give them an awful lot of incentive to take their journalism to the streets and avoid getting story ideas from press releases and police scanners.