The newsroom in your pocket Covering breaking news with a mobile phone
“Singularity”
“The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one at MIT in 1965. What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket.
“What fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.”
--Futurist Ray Kurzweil
Some stats
27 Cellphones per second.
4 Babies per second
•Most successful big media company in the world•Very forward-thinking•Aggressive approach to new technology
Schibsted – Fast Bear to Market
Faster Than TV
VG.no had the video 6 hours before the TV news channels could get their video to the station, ingested, edited, v/o, etc.
Organizing Chaos
MISTAKES:
Many voices
Logistics
Getting material to office
New Ways to Find Sources
Facebook:
Students wrote of their experiences
Way to find friends of witnesses, victims
Not Always Reliable
Rumor: Indian gov’t asking Twitter to be shut down because it was being used by terrorists to track cops
Reality: rumor spread by high school junior in Boston
Shelby Star
Reuters
Hierarchical Information Flow
Question: How often, and under what conditions, do you interact with your readers?
Wildfires – Urgent Need for Info
Iran: Twitter + Mobile + Facebook
“Hamed” is an Iranian refugee living in the Netherlands, and it was from there that he posted the death of 27-year-old Neda Salehi Afgha Soltani. "I am no hero," Hamed said. "The real hero is my friend who risked his life making the video." Facebook friend A Facebook friend, that is. Hamed has never met the author of the film except on the social networking site.
Readers Do It Themselves
For the Code Geeks…
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