How journalism adapts to the digital era is one of this decade’s big questions. More and more of the content has to be real-time, constantly updated, and at the same time more or less everyone is covering more or less everything so differentiation is increasingly difficult. And yes, the money is tight.
With that in mind, let me introduce you to two mobile innovations that could benefit an agile news organization.They won’t singlehandedly rescue a struggling media house, but could
well help it doing more for less money.
Scoopshot is a photo app to connect media and journalists with the app users who have original photographs about an event of interest. The users can contribute to stories and earn cash, while the media can generate richer, and more recent, visual content without much of an extra investment – and to a more engaged audience. Currently Scoopshot is specifically a photo app, but enabling support for crowdsourced video clips would be a very natural addition.
Another example is AT&T’s and its new Video Capture, a video-sharing service aimed at businesses. The most typical use case might involve e.g. a field engineer assigned to fix broken machinery asking for further instructions from a back-office expert, but it could be also used for instance by a journalist to deliver fresh video content from a live case without a camera crew. Although Video Capture has started off as an enterprise service, it wouldn’t be a huge stretch of imagination to extend it to consumer-to-business use. Besides equipping their own staff with it, media organizations could then also apply it to various crowdsourcing assignments to collect video material.
Having more advanced smartphones will mean higher-quality photo and video content, and having more extensive 4G networkswill mean that such content can be delivered on to someone else if not anytime, anywhere then at least most of the time, in most of the places. It’ll be then up to the media industry to createpractices to make most out ofthis new, and rather potent,source of citizen journalism.
