Birth of a new breed of journalists

An article recently appeared in l?express newspaper about the MBC sending its programmes to viewers on their mobile 3G phones. It is rightly said that news and sports events will constitute the main ingredients for mobile viewers who will not want to watch movies or serials on their 3G phones. This triggered me into realising that the reverse procedure is also true, that is, viewers can send in pictures from their mobile phones to the MBC News Studio.

It seems we are all potential news gatherers now. There is no denying the mobile phone has completely transformed news reporting and it is finding its place in the professional environment. Whilst we heard the tragic calls of those caught in the New York twin towers disaster, only four years later people in England were watching what the victims of the July 7th bombings in London were experiencing, thanks to the omnipresent camera phone. The London phone tragedies saw mobile-phone footage aired on Sky News, BBC News and ITN within moments of the first devices going off. BBC News received more than 50 images from the public within an hour of the firsts bomb blast. The event created a news term, that of ?citizen-journalist?. There have been plenty of other examples of people capturing disaster footage on their holiday video cameras, not least the Asian tsunami in December 2004. But images of the devastating London events were by and large, captured on mobile phones.

While broadcasters are pushing towards the digital era to offer sharper pictures to their viewers, the flip-side of this inexorable move towards better quality pictures is the drive for even more immediate images. The viewer will happily watch poor quality video of an event if it brings him or her closer to the action, rather than a beautifully shot story produced by sophisticated means some hours later. It is clear that viewers, wherever they are, are quire relaxed about watching these sometimes very low-definition images.

There are more and more opportunities for the man on the street to be the man breaking the news. 3G technology will improve both the quality and immediacy of such contributions. Citizen journalism is now a recognised part of the news gathering process and most broadcasters have set up systems to receive footage directly from viewer?s mobile phones. In March of this year, the BBC announced it was introducing 3G video reports to news bulletins from five areas around the UK. The service enables news reporters to make video calls to their news studio as part of 10-minute local news segments. MBC viewers often had to make do with a still image accompanied by a telephone commentary if they wanted live information from the more remote zones, like when our ministers re reporting on their missions abroad. This needs no longer be the case, if the right outfits can be found to make effective use of a mobile video phone.

2005 will be remembered as the year of the ?citizen-journalist?, a phrase coined by Oh My News Agency in South Korea. As well as using their mobiles to send in breaking news images that are happening around them, users will be able to watch the end results a few moments later on their phones ! That?s the theory.

J.P.