Mobile Journalism

Synonymous with smartphone editing is a growing tendency to worship new apps and post on social media about the new features as quickly as possible.

Being able to shoot, edit and publish using a smartphone enables immersive cross-border reporting. Rana Sabbagh, senior editor for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at OCCRP, believes all journalists should learn to edit stories on a mobile. “Editing generates diversity in storytelling and a local point of view’. Sabbagh adds, ‘working on a mobile is often safer than carrying a large camera and laptop edit suite”.

In the TV business, we have a saying “waiting on sound” and no truer words have ever been spoken. Soundos are always doing something like waiting for an air-con to switch off, or a car noise to disappear, and we wait with them. And when we aren’t waiting on sound, we often treat sound as an after-thought. But sound is the most important of all the recorded elements.

Here are some tips on location sound recording picked up over my years of television and mojo production and training, which will assist your mojo work.

First and foremost, story rules and a story focus should always dictate the relevant technology and approach — mojo, or hybrid. Having said this, once the story has been developed (see the previous article about developing stories), there are several key focus areas that can be addressed when shooting mojo stories.

In 1993, while working in television, I taught select groups from our audiences to use small digital video (DV) cameras to tell their own personal stories for self-shot TV series.

In 2007, the advent of the iPhone was another game-changer. It became apparent, at least to me, that mobile technology, like DV cameras, would redefine the way we produced TV, even the way we did investigative video journalism. It was a lightbulb moment.

Once you have decided whether your phone is mojo-friendly — enough speed, power, and memory — you might consider the following mojo tools.

One of the first questions I’m asked during my training workshops is, “Can I do mojo on my phone?” “Not if you don’t have memory!” The next often asked question is, “Okay, which phone do I buy?”

Android is like a coalition winning the race on numbers, while iOS is a rich boutique shop going it alone. Are the cheaper Android phones any good? Absolutely. But do you need a new phone? The simple answer is if you can use your smartphone to produce your mojo story — shoot in low-light, run good camera and multi-layered video apps, and it has lots of memory — save your money. If not, you might need a new phone for mojo.

More than three billion smartphone users use more than six million apps to create and upload 500 hours of video every minute. Journalist Charles Feldman calls this 24/7 convergent clickstream an “information tsunami.” I see it as an opportunity and so does Sennheiser who has developed the series of mobile-friendly microphones featured in this series of articles on how to mojo.