mobile | Ryan Sholin

Running for it: Covering an event with a cell phone and a point-and-shoot video camera

Jul 23, ’07 7:23 AM

[UPDATE: If you're showing up at this post looking for coverage of the 2008 race, you should head straight to santacruzsentinel.com or check out the Sentinel's video right here.]

So here’s the assignment, kids:

Cover a 6-mile run with 15,000 registered participants, including a few hundred elite runners looking to finish in the money, and do it as live as possible.

And of course, if you want to keep up at all, you have to do it while running.

So here’s what I did: I set up a page with widgets pulling content from Flickr and Twitter (and thus, Twittergram*), and shot photos and phoned in audio with a cell phone.

In between, I shot video with my own lightweight point & shoot camera to post on the site later.

And of course, we had a photographer and three reporters there, covering the elite runners and the scene.

For those of you taking notes, I ran/jogged/walked about 4.5 miles, starting my coverage at the top of a hill about 1.5 miles into the race where I knew I’d be able to get one quick shot of the leaders as they flew by. Actually, the winner nearly knocked me over as I stepped up onto the curb and out of his way.

The game, of course, is to take these tools and use them for essential breaking news reporting — not just fun events. But the application is obvious — forget about a breaking news blog — you need a breaking news tumblelog where you can post text, SMS messages and photos/audio/video from e-mail to a web service with an RSS feed.

It’s not hard. At all. The hardest part is giving up a touch of editorial control, but then anyone in the newsroom can have access to the tumblelog to edit on the fly.

*Thanks Dave!

Hope for mobile news

Jun 7, ’07 8:05 AM

I’ve gotta admit, when it comes to the question of newspapers adopting new delivery systems, I’m usually the one wagging my finger and saying “You better…”

But John Duncan over at The Inksniffer has a far more hopeful approach when it comes to the prospects for cutting deals with cell phone carriers and getting headlines from newspapers to mobile phones:

“There will, I’m sure, be Powerpoints. I think big cellphone operators, who like to do business with big brands and who can tailor their products by geography, will seek out local newspapers as partners very quickly. Readers may tell researchers about how little they trust newspapers but big telecoms trust us a lot. They advertise with us already. Newspapers know them. Newspapers play golf with them. Newspapers used to carry their books to school for them when they were young.”

He’s probably thinking of larger papers and larger newspaper companies, but the message is clear — this is one area where newspapers can play a few pieces of capital they’ve built up over the years.

As an added bonus, it’s not rocket science. Get your text headlines out on a mobile screen. It’s not difficult. After that, move on to pushing your video content out to iPods. Plenty of instruction booklets sitting around about how to do that. (Note to self: Do that.)

Tools of The Mobile Journalist – mediabistro.com

Jan 19, ’07 4:03 PM

A few details from Chuck Myron, a mojo in Fort Myers. Tools? A Sprint wireless card and a Picasa account. And lots of batteries.

Tools of The Mobile Journalist – mediabistro.com

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$100 million for e-paper firm – maybe you should start thinking about the future

Jan 8, ’07 9:19 PM

Red Herring reports a British e-paper company locked up $100 million in venture capital.

“The company plans to build the plant, with an initial capacity of a million displays a year, in the eastern Germany city of Dresden and start production in 2008. The company said demand for electronic readers is expected to climb to 41.6 million units in 2010.”

E-paper is real, and its coming. The best thing for newspapers to do is to keep moving their online presences forward.

There are three key elements to this technology you’re going to want to start developing now, if you haven’t already:

RSS feeds. I’m embarrassed that the paper I work at doesn’t have news feeds yet, and I’ve been there almost three months now. At the Spartan Daily, implementing feeds was my point of entry for working on the site. I’ll work on that… RSS is going to be your delivery system.
Mobile usability. Have you tried to load your paper’s site on a mobile phone browser lately? How much navigation and advertising do your readers need to scroll through before they get to a clean list of headlines? What will Web design for a flexible semiconducting-polymer screen look like?
Search. Think Google News more than Google here. You’re going to want readers to see your headlines in their topic-based RSS feeds, and the only way to do that — other than by frequently updating high-quality content that draws lots of inbound links — is to develop and design in a way that plays nice with search engines. Brush up on some basic SEO, like matching title tags to h1 tags, and start making the little fixes like this on your news site now.

Why should you bother with all this now? Because the future doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a slow process. You’re not going to get surprised by a new technology — your old technology is just going to slowly become obsolete.