Reuters planning for HD video mobile journalism

The development of mobile phone technology could have a 'transformative effect on journalism', according to Reuters' chief scientist.

Speaking on the phone from New York, last night, to journalists and colleagues gathered at Reuters' Canary Wharf headquarters, Nic Fulton talked about his company's ongoing relations with Nokia to develop equipment for potential mobile journalists.

Reuters last month revealed that it had been experimenting with mobile journalism - at the time calling it MoJo - by giving reporters a lightweight videophone kit that enabled them to file and publish stories without the need of any additional technical or editorial support.

At last night's event Fulton and colleagues outlined how the project was developing and what they saw as the future of this technology.

"We [Nokia and Reuters] believe that mobile technology is evolving extremely fast to the extent that we can see a time, probably not that far out, I'm sure less than five maybe even three years out, when mobile phones could have HD video capability and they could have extremely powerful VPUs and keyboards," Fulton said.

"You might just start saying that's a laptop. I still think that it will ultimately be a very personal mobile device. So clearly there is potential for it to have quite a transformative effect on journalism."

Quality may not be up to the highest standards of TV reports, however, Reuters sees the technology - at least it the short term - as complementary to its existing reporting processes rather than a replacement - with most of the content being used in blogs and to augment text and other stories.

Fulton also explained how the current technology worked. Reporters have N95 mobile phones and use an on-board application, developed by Reuters and Nokia, to upload a draft form multimedia package to a back-end WordPress blogging platform.

Editors can then access the content, tweak if necessary, and publish through Reuters’ usual channels.

Matt Cowan, Reuters TV technology and media reporter (who has been using the mobile kit) said it offered greater scope for personalisation and introduced a 'dynamism' into the reporting process akin to that of the growth of social networks on the web.

Ilicco Elia, Reuters' European mobile manager, added that the news provider was still trying to find the best use of this technology.

To that end, the agency is sending one of its text reporters to cover the opening of Tesco in the US later this week, with just a mobile journalism kit.

The developers of the mobile reporting project also said they were also looking at future events when they could use the technology in live setting.

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