How KTSF Television is using mobile journalism to engage with an under-served community

Credit: Image by Simon nn on Pexels

Journalists at KTSF Television are using mobile journalism (mojo) techniques to provide news to over 1.4 million under-served Asian-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

Geoffrey Roth, director of content development at the station, explained that although the broadcaster has been running successfully since 1976, smartphones have now enabled its reporters to better cover the issues affecting the Chinese community than ever before, providing them with more stories that aren't necessarily picked up by the area's other English-language stations.

"The general manager of KTSF brought me in because he wanted to make the journalists more efficient, effectively increasing the amount of local news they produce and the number of newscasts they do," he said.

"I started out training their reporting core which was essentially eight people, but now the entire news staff of 30 people are trained with mojo skills, so now everyone can go out and do stories alongside their other roles at the station."

Roth, who built the first ever entirely IP-based local newsroom for FOX at WJZY in Charlotte, North Carolina, explained that some of the reporters don't come into the station to work.

They can take advantage of the fact that mojo allows journalists to shoot, edit, publish and broadcast live with their phone out in the field.

"Instead of a reporter going to a story and then having to give themselves an hour and a half to get back to the station, they can spend that time reporting on more stories – they don't have to physically be in the building to do their jobs," he said.

#MoJo - Who Needs Satellites? Edition - using #facetime to do an interview on Asian financial markets in the @KTSF26 morning news #mojocon pic.twitter.com/7tPr9kexYK

— Geoff Roth (@GeoffMoJo) October 24, 2016

Indeed, Roth explained that because reporters now need such little equipment, KTSF Television was able to cheaply send a mojo reporter to Taiwan to cover the Presidential election there, which was of great interest to its Asian audience in San Francisco Bay.

"The only reason we were able to afford to do it given our limited budget was with mojo, as we didn't have to send three or four people over, ship across a load of bulky equipment, or pay a ton of money for international satellite time. All the efficiencies of mobile journalism allowed us to cover that story without breaking the bank."

With mobile journalism, you just have to get people to do it, and once they do, most of them realise how it is making them better journalistsGeoffry Roth, KTSF Television

Before their mojo training with Roth five months ago, the journalists were producing two hours of news programming a day, a Cantonese bulletin at 7pm, and a Mandarin bulletin at 10pm, with the rest of the day's output filled with infomercials, overseas news programmes and other material it didn't produce, which, Roth explained, doesn't draw in audiences or generate a lot of revenue.

But as the team has been able to create much more material with mojo, with approximately 80 per cent of its output produced on mobile phones, the station has been able to cost-effectively shift its resources from the evening shows and produce an additional two-hour news bulletin for morning viewers, all without degrading the quality of the output.

"We are also using resources from the internet such as the MyRadar app and Google's Waze app to present weather, traffic, and financial information that stations used to have to pay literally tens of thousands of dollars for," he said.

"ENPS, our newsroom computer system, also has a mobile app that allows our reporters to write their scripts and put all their footage directly into the newscast run-downs on their phones."

Not all the output from KTSF Television is produced with smartphones, but Roth is aiming for the team to go mobile-only in the next few months.

"The biggest thing I have learned is that with mobile journalism, you just have to get people to do it, and once they do, most of them realise how it is making them better journalists.

"They feel like they can gather more material, have more control over what they are doing, and push the content to different platforms," Roth said.

The team are also experimenting with livestreaming on Facebook, aiming to engage a wider audience using their phones.

"We are looking further down the road at a day when the bulk of your audience is on digital platforms and not necessarily on a broadcast platform, so while doing this may not necessarily help our bottom line financially, I think down the road it will. Those that don't recognise that and start building an audience now are going to be left in the dust," he said.

"We want to add more newscasts, have a bigger presence on digital platforms and also train the 70 people outside of the news department at KTSF to shoot news happening when they are out of the station – the more people you have that are out in the community and able to make content, the better.

"In my opinion, given the economy of this business, efficiency is going to be one of the things that will save us."

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