Nokia Project

Video

2007-04-20T20:31:01Z

Nokia device out-of-the-box

2007-04-20T20:25:16Z

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.

Wiki-news triumphs

2007-04-17T21:21:34Z

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.)

Albarghouti's original, uncut gunshot video.

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.

Technology makes viewers more connected

2007-04-17T21:20:43Z

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.

Interaction design class project presentation

2007-04-15T23:38:34Z

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.

Road to the Final Four: San Jose, Days 1 & 2

2007-03-23T16:32:38Z

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

Daily news <> citizen journalism

2007-03-02T16:49:26Z

News is hard to find on a daily basis. I took a phone
video camera out for a news search. I learned I had
some camera orientation tendency problems. News, though?
You decide if you want to see this on a daily basis.
Video by Rachel Seymour on a Nokia N73 cell phone.

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.

The Perfect Storm

2007-03-02T16:43:58Z

Click to enlarge.
Photo by: Beth Breitenstein

The title of this blog serves as a metaphor for what my citizen journalism venture was like. I set out with my Motorola RAZR, over the weekend, to shoot some cool vid. Spot news, a squirrel eating an acorn? I didn't have a preference. I just wanted to shoot something interesting. I decided to record some storm footage since there was a thunderstorm hitting Kansas City. 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.

RAZR puts the Grrr in Swingers

2007-03-01T18:40:31Z

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.

All the king's horses, and all the king's men...

2007-03-01T18:03:19Z

...couldn’t put my video back together again. 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

Everything in the processed worked great. By great, meaning that I ended up with about 33 seconds of garbled audio and a bunch of missing video. I’m pretty sure the multiple conversions killed the attempt. I wanted to try and use only tools that were already on my computer. WMM comes with XP and I had the conversion tool from previously playing with a video off my phone. Had I just settled on a single shot or gone up to the college and used Final Cut to put the three shots together, everything probably would have gone swimmingly. 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.

Capturing my white whale

2007-03-01T17:03:32Z

The white whale
Video: Patrick Lafferty,
with a Motorola SLVR

It's easy to dismiss the camera phone if you focus on the visual quality of the image. This is very often the argument against their use in the newsroom, as you know if you've been reading the posts on this page (and you should be). But quality is a nebulous term. The footage to the left is not what I would call good "quality", but what it captures is priceless to me. You see, I have pursued the "paper car" seen in the video for months and, until today, it eluded my photographic grasp. The car would be there, but I didn't have a camera phone. A friend would see the car, but again, no camera. Once, it was spotted in the computer center lot and and a call came to the newsroom to run out with a camera. By the time we got there, it was too late. "Moby blue" scooted away, just out of my grasp. What made the difference today? My new Motorola SLVR. No, this isn't an ad for the SLVR. In fact, looking at the image quality it provides might make you run into the open arms of Nokia's N-series phones (full disclosure: we are working with Nokia on uses for the N-series, in case you missed that). Nevertheless, because my new phone has a VGA (ugh!) camera in it, I can now share the glory that is the "paper car" with the rest of the world. That is what I call a "quality" catch!

The white whale, from behind.
View from the front
Photo: Patrick Lafferty, with a Motorola SLVR

Who drives this vehicle? Why do they keep so much paper in it? Is it, in fact, hard to drive over speed bumps due to the low-riderish, compressed suspension? These are all questions that a citizen journalist could answer by staking out the car and talking with the owner. Let's face it, a reporter isn't going to cover this story. Me? I had to get back to the newsroom to show off my catch to all of you. This must be that pesky lack of time so many have written about interfering with the citizen journalist. So let me ask you, the viewer, is it worth-while to see this absurd vehicle in the diminished visual quality I have provided or would you prefer that I just verbally describe such a sight to you? Let me know in the comments.

Adventures in Citizen Journalism

2007-03-01T17:02:40Z

After my news shift this Friday I met with Patrick who set me up with a sweet $500 Nokia N73 to film my citizen journalism assignment. I asked for little instruction with the device and encountered my first bit of trouble when I couldn't even figure out how to turn it on. (A quick phone call remedied that situation.) After I finally got the thing turned on, I experimented with it by filming my dog, fish, and roommates. Having a firm grasp on the capabilities of this gadget I proceeded to carry it with me the entire weekend waiting for inspiration to strike. Inspiration didn't strike until Sunday when I realized I needed to record SOMETHING in order to get the project done. Then I remembered something in Lawrence that really irked me. Traffic signals. More specifically the traffic signals at the intersections of 9th and Vermont St. and 8th and Vermont St. The two are never synchronized, and the first driver in line can never make the green light at 8th St. when heading north and going the 20mph speed limit. I had the idea to highlight this problem for my first vlog, but quickly realized the large GL camera were not designed to be operated while driving. But the Nokia N73 on the other hand... The camera phone worked out exactly how I had hoped. It was easy for me to operate while driving, and was portable enough for me to do everything "on the spot" without the need of a tripod or microphone. You can judge the quality of the film yourself. The only problem I have with the phone was the difficulty of downloading the media. The video files are saved at a tiny aspect ratio, and when I imported them into FInal Cut I couldn't increase the size. I ended up having to use iMovie, a program I had touched before. It is possible that these phones will have a place in the future of journalism. I think I have proved they can be used by real people to bring light to a problem, no matter how small, that effects citizens. The only downside is the compatibility of the phone with current technology, something I'm sure will give newsroom directors many headaches.

‘Citizen Journalism’ catches unexpected but fails to capture expected

2007-03-01T16:58:39Z

Some truly uninteresting video

In order to complete this experiment of ‘citizen journalism,’ I tried to imagine how a citizen would go about getting a story. I only gave myself a few hours to complete the experiment because, after all, news is timely and most ordinary people wouldn’t have a lot of time to complete a story. My results were just about what I expected; the only worthwhile ‘citizen journalism’ comes at unexpected times. When we think of ‘citizen journalists’ we think of the shocking video out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or the cell phone video from Saddam Hussein’s execution. We do not think of someone shooting video of pot holes on local streets (See above video!). The brilliance of ‘citizen journalism’ is that it catches the unexpected. The downfall of it is that it isn’t sufficient for reliable coverage. Television stations can not be everywhere at a moments notice, which is what makes ‘citizen journalism’ so valuable in some situations. One thing I have learned in the news business is to “expect the unexpected.” The problem is that we can not always be at the unexpected by simply snapping our fingers. “Citizen journalists’ can be anywhere at a given moment, like at a local fire last year, which provides us with astonishing pictures that would otherwise never be seen. Although ‘citizen journalists’ can sometimes bring us the most compelling footage, it is always associated with a compelling or historic story. When it comes to telling the story of sub-par streets in Lawrence, people will not accept the above footage on the news. ‘Citizen Journalism’ is only as good as the phenomenon that it covers.

I burn fat while you burn gas

2007-02-27T17:41:38Z

Driving is expensive. Gas costs lots and tune-ups are rip-offs. Parking downtown is often impossible and sitting in traffic sucks. This is besides the obvious environmental problems driving exacerbates, or our country's little oil addiction, which (arguably) is a healthy kick to our "keep the Middle East in turmoil so we can take advantage of its resources" reflex. The only real reason to drive anywhere in Lawrence (at least in the areas students frequent -- campus, downtown, student ghetto, East Lawrence) is that it will get you there faster than walking or riding a bike. Or is it faster? Nate Martin reports.

Tales from a camera phone

2007-02-27T17:39:52Z

I threw out my journalistic instincts and know-how and became a citizen journalist for a day. I lugged around a camera phone and tried to find and capture a newsworthy event. But, I found, those knuckleheads, who occasionally make the five o’clock news for being at the right place at the right time with their camera phones, are simply lucky — not reporters. The Assignment: Be a citizen journalist. Carry around a camera phone, go about your daily business and see what you find.

Kennedy's in Waldo, Kansas City, Mo

The Outcome: Outdated, "Blair Witch Project"- like video of the wreckage at Kennedy’s Bar and Grill (Waldo, KCMO) and an unprofessional interview from a police officer. The cop said the fire roared for 10 hours on February 16. Asbestos was found at Kennedy’s, which will prolong reconstruction, and 75th Street Brewery will take three to four weeks to rebuild, due to all the smoke damage. My Feelings: Many things struck me about my experience as a citizen journalist. First, the officer I spoke with was helpful and willing to answer my questions. He wasn’t hesitant or intimidated. If I showed up with a tripod and a big camera, he may have been less inclined to speak with me. Citizen journalists may appear less harmful to officials and experts than reporters and journalists; therefore, it could be easier to find story ideas. While at Kennedy’s, I found myself asking the officer questions while video taping the wreckage. Though the camera wasn’t focused on him, I was hoping he would reveal something new and newsworthy about the fire and I would catch it on tape. I have taken an ethics in journalism class — citizen journalists have not. They may use unethical tactics to get interviews and stories. Back at my car after taping, it struck me how unprepared I felt to create a story. I had video but no written notes. I made a visual story but not a factual one. I couldn’t remember anything the police officer said. Citizen journalists can provide news stations with video but not actual stories. Professional journalists still have to go out and research, interview and develop a story worth broadcasting. It was also difficult coming up with a story and getting my video on the computer. In conclusion, I found tales told from a camera phone are tall and incomplete.