Nokia Project

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.

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.

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.

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.

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