Nokia Project

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Uploading video shot of the Nokia phone "out-of-the-box experience". Overall, there's a lot to be desired about how the thing is packaged, introduced, and users oriented. The vid doesn't show elapsed time clock or have quality audio, but it took well over a half-hour for the two persons to figure it out. Just FYI.

News no longer belongs to corporations.
Screen grab from LiveJournal.com

Wiki-news, not mere citizen journalism, rolled out the news of yesterday's horrorific shootings at Virginia Tech University. Information came not only from degree-holding arbiters of What's News, but from folks literally in the line of fire.

The Roanoke Times disdained using the traditional format for the story, instead opting for moment-by-moment blogging by several reporters. AP producers and reporters jumped online to use Facebook, blogs, Xangas, and email to find student sources for their stories, like Mr. Resnick from Washington (right).

Jamal Albarghouti's cell phone video wasn't the only submission from wiki-reporters, though. CNN had about 100 additional content submissions—video, photos, and enough heresay to worry any newspaper's lawyer. (For example, some folks quickly misidentified an innocent but "Asian" student and vilified him online before the alleged culprit, South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui, was named.)

We saw mistakes and outright dumb speculation, it's true. We also saw as much information (or even more than) the official news gatekeepers at the scene provided. As a journalism student, I want to work to get the story right; but I also want as much information as possible. Wiki-news will allow some mistakes to slip through, but I'll let that bother me as soon as newspapers become mistake-free themselves.

The Nokia N70: The type of cell phone Albarghouti used to capture the video.

Jamal Albarghouti put his life on the line as he whipped out his cell phone to take video of the chaos around him. Unaware of what fully was going on, Albarghouti continued to take video

His video ran continuously throughout the day on CNN. Later, reporters on site did traditional stand-ups and updates as a part of the all-day news coverage. But it was Albarghouti’s citizen journalism coverage that hit America the most. That’s the thing about citizen journalism and how technology has made it a possibility for viewers to be on the scene. In this case, citizen journalism allowed the most real news coverage anyone could ever get. Updates throughout the day had people talking, “I heard this, I heard that…,” but it was Albarghouti’s citizen video that put people at the scene. The cell phone vid sent chills down viewers’ spines as they watched intently.

The actual video also is news in itself, and that can be seen by the feedback Albarghouti got when he received multiple facebook messages making sure he was okay, after people saw him in danger from his CNN appearance. Those who didn’t even know Albarghouti could easily contact him through the online network in a matter of seconds, something unheard of not very long ago.

The Virginia Tech shootings coverage exemplifies what is happening in our generation of news reporters and news watchers. Technology and citizen journalism make for more genuine coverage, faster response times, and more involvement of those who watch the news.

In the School of Design we are working with the Nokia N73 from a different angle. Our class has analyzed the out of the box experience as well as the usability of the phone. However, that is not what this blog post is about. I'm here to give an update on our project. Our project has been roughly defined as Mobile Journalism. We took the task of defining the term, the culture, and the interfaces available. From there we worked on trying the capture different ways to improve the way users can supply content for other users and professional news agencies.

From our research we gathered that limiting an interface to the citizen journalists alone presents a far too small demographic. More interest lies in a program/web-site that encourages users to add content of all types, from vacation photos, to concert footage to news events. Along those lines we are going to be creating a system that allows users to share video and pictures across a network searching through time and space. I'm posting a link to a pdf of our fist presentation. This presentation was our status report for the beginning of the project. More posts will follow in regards to this particular project.

Be sure to check out a smattering of coverage by Nick Nelson, master of technical difficulties, shot with the Nokia N73.

I am a college student, which means I am broke. I buy the cheapest items, and when I can get something free, I do.

So, when I went to get a new phone, I naturally wanted the cheapest one. As of right now cheap cell phones don’t equal video camera capabilities. Shucks. How am I going to become a talented citizen journalist without one, though?

Wait, people aren’t thinking about citizen journalism when they purchase their cell phones. They are thinking about how cool it will be to get incriminating video of their drunken friends. In non-college student cases, they might be excited about video of their kids or grandkids.

Why aren’t they thinking about citizen journalism? Because news doesn’t gather itself up and drop at your feet.

I can walk around all week looking for news and end up with the same video shown here.

If I am lucky, I can catch one of the million false fire alarms on campus to report – like anyone cares to watch several of those on a daily basis.

Citizen journalism takes place during emergencies, natural or otherwise, that affect mass amount of people. Citizen journalists add to the rich, personal view point of mass media news.

But, last time I checked, massive disasters don’t happen on a regular daily basis, at least not in Lawrence, Kan.

When a microburst hit the town in the spring of 2006, The Lawrence Journal-World posted citizen journalists' photos online. People wanted to see the extent of the destruction. The amount of photos by a variety of people rolled in to display just how extensive the damage was around town.

Citizen journalism helped enrich the coverage, but it didn't replace it. Citizen journalism alone wouldn't have done justice.

Good citizen journalism equals large scale destruction. Not the day to day life.

After all, I tried finding news on a simple day-to-day time frame.

Until Armageddon hits, citizen journalists can stick to helping erich coverage of large scale disasters.

Click to enlarge.
Photo by: Beth Breitenstein

Lightning always looks cool on tape, especially when shown in slow motion. So, umbrella in hand, I sat outside and waited for that lightining strike to occur, hoping its destination wouldn't be on my head. I held the phone up to record right as a PERFECT strike came. As I pulled my phone down to try to save what I recorded, my RAZR showed a fuzzy screen and said it could not store the footage. Noooooooooooooooooo! Right as the PERFECT storm came, my phone decided it was the PERFECT time to no longer shoot video.

Now, in the real news world, this wouldn't happen. Instead of relying on a 3 inch long Motorola RAZR to shoot something amazing in 15 second intervals, the reporter would have an expensive hi tech, GOOD QUALITY, camcorder.

While my venture in the citizen journalism realm was unsuccesful due to a "technical difficulty", I still do not know how I would have gotten my video off of my cell phone, and onto a computer. According to the Motorola RAZR manual, I hit "copy", and then hook up a "Device" to transfer it. While I consider myself to be somewhat technically saavy, this is unknown territory to me. I can export a video from a DV camera, but not from a cell phone.

What this venture into the citizen journalism world has taught me is that we can't rely on citizen journalists alone. We can't rely on cell phones, and we certainly cannot just hand out dv cameras to everyone to catch the news. Who knows, there may be people out there with great video, but they just don't know how to transfer it to a computer. There also may be citizen journalists out there that missed a key news moment because of a faulty phone.

So, hopefully, lightning will strike for some other citizen journalist out there, but it just isn't gonna happen for me.

There’s a classic scene in Swingers: Mikey (Jon Favreau), after careful drunken consideration, calls up a girl he just met at the bar that night. He leaves a perfectly acceptable message on her answering machine with one problem – he wasn’t able to give the last number of his phone number before getting cut off. He calls back to give the last digit, then falls into the same trap again. Over the next few minutes, he hilariously and painfully descends into a downward spiral of incoherent babble, frustrated by the limitations of the technology at hand.

Eleven years later and the basic storyline remains the same. I have a RAZR phone, which had generally satisfied my expectations. Then I tried using it to play “citizen journalist” this week, and it was an absolute train wreck.

The quality of the video is strikingly poor with limited zoom capabilities. The worst part is that it only shoots in fifteen second increments. You want to interview someone? Good luck trying to fit a complete question and answer in fifteen seconds. And then you are prompted to “save” or “delete” the clip before you can record another one, which disrupts any natural flow to the interview.

“Gee thanks for those eight gorgeous seconds of insight, sir…hang on just a sec while I save this file to the video gallery, select a file name, get back to the main menu and then choose to create a new ‘flix”--

The Swingers scenario is 11 years old now, and nifty advances like Caller ID have sort of solved the problem. In a few more years, it’s a pretty safe bet that prices will go down and technology will improve for video phones, and citizen journalists around the globe will begin to reap the benefits. Until then--for the vast majority of people who don’t feel like dropping half a dozen C Notes on a mobile phone—we’ll just have to settle for abysmal production value, fifteen grainy seconds at a time.

The video to the right is one of three source videos I used to create this train wreck. I was trying to cover/review a new video game, Supreme Commander. The idea needed three separate shots. I might have set myself up for failure though, as I decided that I was only going to allow myself one shot at everything, no re-dos. The plan was to:

• Shoot 30 second clip of buying Supreme Commander (filming with a Samsung A920 phone – maximum 30 second clips)
• Shoot 10 second interview with another customer also buying SC
• Shoot 30 seconds worth of action scenes from game while talking over them with a short review
• Convert from phone video format (.3g2) to .wmv to edit in Windows Movie Maker
• Glue the shots together in WMM (crude but good description in link)
• Convert from .wmv to .mov for the blog
• End up with 1 minute 10 second clip

Lessons learned:

1. Use better conversion/editing tools.
2. .3g2 format seems to play just fine unconverted, but it's small at 176x144.
3. Faces look better than computer screenshots with my phone camera (video doesn’t show this, but I learned it).
4. I pity the fool who would have to manage content like this.