The Mobile Media Toolkit helps you make sense of the growing role of mobile tech in media. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, mobile tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media. We cover it all, from basic feature phones to the latest smartphone applications.
It's an exciting day for us here at MobileActive.org as we launch the Mobile Media Toolkit. For the last year we have been interviewing people, researching projects, and testing tools, to bring you this free resource. It is designed to help you evaluate and effectively deploy the right tools for reporting and sharing content on and to mobile devices.
Please visit the Toolkit. Share it with others. Add to it! It's available in English, Spanish, and Arabic. So, please join us and say Welcome, Bienvenidos, and مرحبا to the Mobile Media Toolkit!
Activists, rights defenders, and journalists use mobile devices for reporting, organizing, mobilizing, and documenting. We have written about many of these uses for years now, describing how mobile phones provide countless benefits to activists and rights defenders. Mobile tech is relatively low cost and allows for increased efficiencies and vast reach, for example. But, there is a darker side.
Mobile Phones present specific risks to rights defenders, journalists, and activists. We believe that is is critically important to know that mobile communication is inherently insecure and exposes rights defenders and those working in sensitive environment to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome. (We provide an overview of those risks in this Primer, for instance)
To address mobile safety and security for rights defenders, we are introducing SaferMobile, to help activists, human rights defenders, and journalists assess the mobile communications risks that they are facing, and then use appropriate mitigation techniques to increase their ability to organize, report, and work more safely.
What is SaferMobile?
Online and offline educational and tactical resources (risk evaluation tools, case studies, how-to guides, security tool reviews);
Trainings and curricula for use in various countries and with different constituencies;
Specific mobile security software focused on the needs of rights defenders, activists, and journalists.
As will all that we do, we believe that there certain values and principles that are paramount in this work. For SaferMobile, we are following these principles:
We believe that skilled, trained, and knowledgeable activists, journalists, and rights defenders are key to democratic changes. We also believe that the smart and effective use of technology constitutes an integral piece of their skill set.
The better activists, journalists, and rights defender are able to work, the more safely they are able to organize and communicate, the more likely it is that their work is effective and heard.
We are committed to accessible, useful, actionable, and technically accurate and secure content, materials, and software.
We are also committed to describing technological vulnerabilities in terms that non-technical users can easily understand.
We work with activists on the ground to ensure that the content we produce addresses real uses and risks.
We also seek responsive connections between activists and security professionals so that both are more able to assess and respond to changing risks.
Lastly, we are maintaining information that reflects current security risks and technological vulnerabilities and is vetted for security and technological accuracy by knowledgeable experts.
Roadmap and Process
The SaferMobile project is just beginning its second Phase. Phase 1 included needs assessment with users and peers – activists, rights defenders, journalists, technologists, security experts, and mobile developers. Through this research, we outlined plans for web content, training curriculum and tools (software) and are now creating these pieces in Phase 2 of the project (May-August 2011).
Safer Photos: How to Remove Location Information from Mobile Images data sheet 13052 Views
Author:
Melissa Ulbricht
Abstract:
This article and screencast shows you how to remove location information from photos taken on a mobile phone.
In a previous post, we described how to add location information to mobile content, including images and stories. For some reports, location information adds value, context, and interest to venue-specific reports. But today, we talk about how to remove that same location information. This is also detailed, step by step, in this screencast.
How to Add Location Information to Mobile Content data sheet 5760 Views
Author:
Melissa Ulbricht
Abstract:
This how-to focuses on the tools and techniques that you can use to add location-based information to mobile content.
Location information can add value to your stories and content and can help journalists who report on specific communities, reporters who create venue-specific multimedia, or citizen journalists who cover events in which location is relevant.
Location information has many advantages: It provides more context. It helps journalists and publishers find an interested audience; users searching for information around specific locations will most easily find information that is tagged with a location. Location information lends itself to aggregation; content with location information can be put on maps and other visualizations, which makes it more appealing for audiences to examine. Through this, it can be used in pattern-finding. Aggregations may show interesting patterns that would not be evident from individual reports. Finally, location information can leverage social media.
Radio Azadi in Afghanistan Goes Mobile data sheet 4187 Views
In Afghanistan, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is three months into an interactive SMS service that allows listeners to access content and participate in the program via mobile phone.
Through the interactive SMS service, Radio Azadi is now able to both send and receive SMS messages from subscribers. As a news organization, the main goal of RFE/RL is reaching an audience. “We want to make sure our content is available on whatever platform Afghans want to consume it on,” Julian Knapp of RFE/RL said. The service allows listeners to become texters, and people around the country have sent in messages to the radio station, to the tune of about 200 messages per day.
Prabhas Pokharel contributed research and writing to this article.
We turn now from producing video on your mobile to audio to show you different ways that people are delivering content to mobile phones. Sending audio content can help you reach new and increasingly mobile audiences. It can also be a great way to reach semi- or illiterate populations or others for whom written content is not suitable.
There are many channels to deliver audio content to mobiles: calling listeners, providing numbers for them to call, having mobile web or app-accessible radio, or leveraging radios that are included in many mobiles. This post will focus primarily on projects and tools that use phone calls, or the "voice channel," to share content.
There are quite a few projects that disseminate audio content using the voice channel:
Many mobile phones can capture video footage. This has enabled both trained journalists and citizen reporters to more easily capture footage including images that were rarely seen before. The Polk Journalism Award in 2009, for example, was awarded to a video from Iran captured on a mobile phone. Today, more and more journalists are using mobile phones to record video and quickly transfer content to their newsrooms via mobile data connections.
Using mobiles to capture video isn't new news. But there is good news: You don't need a high-quality video camera to do high-quality reporting, be you in the U.S. or elsewhere. Many journalists and citizen reporters today use smartphones to capture video footage. Examples abound. Vancouver journalism students use an iPhone with some additional hardware and software to do all their video editing on the phone. Voices of Africa uses a Nokia N-series smartphone. In his book Mobile Journalism in the Asian Region, Stephen Quinn uses both iPhones and Nokia smartphones. This post will provide some tips and tools on how you can record quality video and audio from your mobile phone.
Make Sure Your Phone is Capable
Phone hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper. With an older phone, you may consider video enhancement software, which can offer a cheaper way to get better quality video content. For high quality video recording on a mobile, the best phones available today feature 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second. 320 x 240 pixels at 15 frames per second produces acceptable web-quality video.
Lower resolutions will look grainy and pixelated without software enhancement, and video below 15 frames per second will look choppy. On the high quality end, these are some good mobile phones with excellent video cameras:
PC Magazine featured these five video-phone models with varying price ranges. The article includes lengthy reviews and a matrix comparison of the phones.
The GSMArena.com database features 1800 phones with video capabilities, 70 of which are listed on this page. The site allows you to search for cameras based on various criteria and links directly to carriers around the world who are selling these phones.
The Nokia N series phones are generally highly recommended for video recording. The N82, N93, and N95 are mentioned often by independent reviewers.
Go Shoot (good) Video
When it comes to shooting video, the major difference between mobiles and mainstream camcorders is that mobile phones have simpler (and smaller) cameras. It is important to understand what makes for good quality video given these limitations. Some suggested tools and tips are listed here.
Beyond the Demographic: How Sourcing Through Texting Connects Journalists and Citizens in Detroit data sheet 3214 Views
If a large truck illegally barrels through a neighborhood and no reporters are around to see it, does it make the story? It does if local residents with mobile phones can text truck sightings to a local public radio station. This is the premise behind a new pilot project called “Sourcing through Texting” from a team at The Takeaway radio program. Sourcing through Texting provides a way to connect citizens with journalists via mobile phones.
The Takeaway is a radio program produced in New York City (a co-production of Public Radio International and public radio station WNYC in collaboration with the BBC World Service, The New York Times, and WGBH Boston) which can be heard live online or on the radio at about 60 stations in “Takeaway cities” across the U.S.
The Role of Digital Networked Technologies in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution data sheet 2285 Views
Author:
Joshua Goldstein
Publication Date:
Dec 2007
Publication Type:
Other
Abstract:
This working paper is part of a series examining how the Internet influences democracy. This report is a narrative case study that examines the role of the Internet and mobile phones during Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. The first section describes the online citizen journalists who reported many stories left untouched by "self-censored" mainstream journalists. The second section investigates the use of digital networked technologies by pro-democracy organizers. This case study concludes with the statement that the Internet and mobile phones made a wide range of activities easier, however the Orange Revolution was largely made possible by savvy activists and journalists wililng to take risks to improve their country.
Over 10,000 citizen reports relating to widespread flooding in Pakistan have been submitted across the spectrum of organizations using the SeenReport platform. The service allows anyone to create a profile and submit text, photos, and videos from a mobile phone for immediate publication on the Web.
The case study is part of the Mobile Media Toolkit that will include many other case studies, how-to guides, resources, and tools on how use mobile phones for reporting, content delivery, and citizen participation, to be puplished this Fall.
If You Build It, They Will Come: SeenReport and Mobile Citizen Journalism in Pakistan data sheet 4327 Views
The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports through mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.
SeenReport (from “see ‘n report”) is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or e-mail. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. A YouTube video explains more about the service.
The SeenReport platform is designed to augment stories on online news sites. The platform has been purchased and customized by other media organizations in Pakistan, which helps to both promote citizen journalism in the country and to create a revenue stream for SeenReport.
For citizen reporters, Fromdistance Mobile Citizen Reporter enables anyone with the application to send high-resolution images and videos from a mobile phone directly to a publisher or the web. This makes delivery quick and easy.
For publishers, Mobile Professional Reporter delivers content that is fit to the publisher's needs (video and images are automatically converted and resized) and the system is integrated with a publisher's existing content management system.
It also enables reporters and publishers to make themselves more accessible and better manage incoming content.
Fromdistance Mobile Journalism includes two tools: Mobile Citizen Reporter and Mobile Professional Reporter. For citizen reporters, Fromdistance Mobile Citizen Reporter enables anyone with the application to send high-resolution images and videos from a mobile phone directly to a publisher or to the web. Users may download the Mobile Citizen Reporter application for free.
For publishers, Mobile Professional Reporter delivers content that is fit to the publisher's needs (video and images are automatically converted and resized) and the system is integrated with a publisher's existing content management system. To become a publisher, a user must contact Fromdistance. Publishers can define their own terms of use for acquiring content (size and copyright, for instance). The service can work with large files.
For citizen reporters, Fromdistance Mobile Citizen Reporter enables quick and easy delivery in an all-in-one tool for citizen and independent journalists. Users may download the Mobile Citizen Reporter application for free. It supports all Nokia multimedia handsets and other Series 60 devices.
For publishers, Mobile Professional Reporter delivers content that is fit to the publisher's needs and the system is integrated with an existing content management system, making content delivery standardized and efficient. To become a publisher, a user must contact Fromdistance. Publishers can define their own terms of use for acquiring content. The service can work with large files.
Main Services:
Stand-alone Application
Tool Maturity:
Currently deployed
Platforms:
Other
Program/Code Language:
Other
Organizations Using the Tool:
The Fromdistance website says that "many leading media companies and publishers" have chosen the Mobile Professional Reporter tool, but it does not provide a list of company names. A datasheet also includes screenshots of use cases.
Camera Phone Images, Videos, Live Streaming: A Contemporary Visual Trend data sheet 2964 Views
Author:
Gaby David
Publication Date:
Mar 2010
Publication Type:
Journal article
Abstract:
Writing for a new media review is like writing history as events unfold. In a short time, this article will be out of date and perhaps no more than a few personal 2.0 snapshots taken of a slice of our lives circa 2009. Nevertheless, it is useful to draw a clear picture of how this medium is being used today, to define some of its emerging social properties, and to document and pay closer attention to its influence on our daily experiences and self-mediations. By self-mediations I refer to how each one of us decides his or her digital imprint: what we post online, whether they are videos, photographs, CVs, and the like. Due to the enormous quantity of content produced by users – now usually called prosumers – we should pay close attention to these doings.
My focus will be on how camera phones affect how news is created and shared, reminding us of how closely the concept of ‘newsworthiness’ is linked to immediacy. Then I will briefly compare the camera phone video experience to the cinematic experience and discuss how film narrative and conventions have affected camera use for better or for worse. Finally, I will pose some open questions that touch on the academic and social value of the camera phone images, and on how contextualising them remains a crucial ingredient in all analysis. I will conclude by considering the visual impact that this handheld object is having on our lives and relationships.
CGNet Swara is a new audio-based citizen journalism service in Chhattisgarh, India. Citizen journalists can call a phone number to record news, and listeners can call in to hear news recorded by citizens around them. When citizen journalists call, they simply press 1 to record news and record some audio onto the system. Listeners can call the same number, press 2, and hear the last three items that the moderators have selected to be published on to the service.
The moderators receive requests via email when a citizen journalist posts content, after which they verify the report (sometimes adding notice that a report isn't verified, sometimes investigating more, on a case-by-case basis), edit the recording, and publish it. There are currently three moderators, all professionally trained journalists.
The same technologies that groups of ordinary citizens are using to write operating systems and encyclopedias are fostering a quiet revolution in another area - social activism. On websites such as Avaaz.org and Wikipedia, citizens are forming groups to report on human rights violations and organize email writing campaigns, activities formerly the prerogative of professionals. This article considers whether the participatory potential of technology can be used to mobilize ordinary citizens in the work of human rights advocacy.
Existing online advocacy efforts reveal a de facto inverse relationship between broad mobilization and deep participation. Large groups mobilize many individuals, but each of those individuals has only a limited ability to participate in decisions about the group’s goals or methods. Thus, although we currently have the tools necessary for individuals to engage in advocacy without the need for professional organizations, we are still far from realizing an ideal of fully decentralized, user-generated activism.
Drawing on the insights of network theory, the article proposes a model of “networked activism” that would help ensure both deep participation and broad mobilization by encouraging the formation of highly participatory small groups while providing opportunities for those small groups to connect with one another. Drawing on a series of interviews with human rights and other civil society organizations, the article recommends specific design elements that might foster a model of networked activism. The article concludes that although online activism is unlikely to replace some of the functions served by human rights organizations, efforts to create synergies between traditional and online efforts have the potential to provide avenues for real, meaningful, and effective citizen participation in human rights advocacy.
There are different scenarios where it is more desirable to have a method of communication that does not depend on cellular or Internet backbone infrastructure:
Sometimes that infrastructure is down - for example due to natural disaster, or man-made "shocks" to the system, from a terrorist attack to simply a massive gathering of people who want to communicate all at the same time, for example at a ball-game or in a conference hall.
Sometimes infrastructure is just not there - like in some developing countries or regions, or rural areas.
Sometimes, one is interested in circumventing censorship, in order to enable civic communications or in order to get news out of a country or conflict zone.
Sometimes one just wants to save money and other costs - why use an expensive infrastructure that was made to get information to the other side of the world, and pay a service tax to the operator, when communication is local by nature? For example for internal communication in a rural village, campus, or enterprise.
Aside from the cases where infrastructure-based communication is not the best way to go, close proximity device-to-device communications offer several added advantages of their own:
A broadcast can be targeted to a limited geographic area without the need to use heavy GIS servers and requiring all participating end points to report their absolute locations.
Opportunistic communications with previously unknown parties, where the co-location serves as a discovery and bootstrap mechanism, and knowing absolute "global" addressing (email address, phone number, etc.) is not required in advance.
Natural mobility patterns of people or vehicles carrying the mobile devices can be leveraged to physically rout information from place to place, or from source to destination. People and vehicles can become "data-mules", or a "sneaker-net". For example, a bus carrying wifi enabled device can act as a "data-mule" and collect information from schools or villages along its path, delivering it to the internet when it reaches a connected access point. People moving away from a natural disaster or a civic demonstration can carry with them pictures, messages, and news from the disconnected zone to the outside world.
The mobile device can act as a sensor in the physical world - depending on the type of short-range radio used, it can sense peers who are physically proximate with varying accuracy.
In some cases the close-proximity communication adds improved security and authenticity, since all parties must be within a certain physical range of one another.
For all of the above scenarios there is a set of common technical requirements and features. The idea behind Comm.unity is to unite them into one core framework that allows development of applications for all of these cases. Different scenarios would call for more specific adaptations (for example added security for some of the scenarios), so Comm.unity is designed to be very modular, and allow developers to use just what they need for the applications that they build on top of it. It is also designed to be extensible by the developer community, so new features and modules could be added. This system is not meant to replace infrastructure, but rather augment it.
Comm.unity is a software framework in development, which is intended to allow developers and researchers to easily create applications that are proximity aware and socially aware, and can run on a large set of existing consumer devices. It implements a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for any centralized servers, coordination, or administration. It is designed to span an extensible set of radio interfaces (WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, etc.).
Comm.unity is targeted for field deployment as well as for supporting advanced mobile-phone-based research. The feature-set for field deployment consists of a basic set of functionalities that are simple and explicitly defined. The research aspects include additional features that are more experimental, or support collection of research data - for example modules for performing logging a user's behavior and other sensor data, performing data-mining, machine learning and other types of on-device learning of a user's context and social activity.
Tool Category:
App resides and runs on a mobile phone
Key Features :
Communications unity: The current state of the close proximity networking space is very fragmented - Many different standards and technologies, and even devices with similar radios (e.g. Bluetooth or wi-fi) are not always able to communicate directly to each other due to limitations imposed by vendor, service provider, or simply lack of appropriate software. Comm.unity aims to resolve that by creating software and protocols that could run on a large set of different mobile and stationary devices, and allow them to directly talk to one another as long as they have similar physical radio interfaces. This means, for example, that iPhones would be able to discover and communicate with Nokia Symbian phones or Android phones via Bluetooth, no matter what mobile operator they belong to, and a WinMobile phone could connect to any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer via wi-fi without any special issues.
Unifying close-proximity technologies: There is a growing number of technologies that support close-proximity and device-to-device radio communications, wi-fi (802.11), Bluetooth, Zigbee, near-field technologies, wi-bree, or infrared technolgies, to name a few. If we abstract the common actions that applications using these technologies need to perform, we could define a common set of functionalities, for example: device discovery, sending a short message, or sending a file. With these and similar primitives, a programmer could write an application that can very easily be adapted to run on different network interface technologies.
Reusable codebase (sample modules: peer-to-peer networking, social awareness, logging, ...)
Extensible Architecture - Modular building blocks
Modular Runtime - Not all modules have to be loaded in runtime, this way strong devices could run high-processing load activities, while weaker mobile devices could run a minimal set of features.
Mobile phones are the tool of choice for a new group of young reporters in Africa. Voices of Africa Media Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit, trains young journalists in Africa to create news videos for the web using mobiles.
The foundation currently has programs in Kenya, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa, with plans to expand to more countries in 2010. The training program for the young journalists lasts nine months and teaches the trainees how to create video news reports with cell phones. At the beginning of the program, the small group (there are usually six or fewer participants per program) comes together and is trained for three to four days in the basics of mobile reporting (both how to use the technology and in basic journalism). Then they return to their communities, and for a period of six months, use the phones to make video reports on local stories.
Traditional news media is a changing industry and conversations discussing the future of news media as it transforms itself abound. What is the future of the newsroom in citizen journalism?
SaveTheNews.org, an organization that is devoted to bringing public policy into conversation about the future of news media, hosted a forum in late August where former staff of Rocky Mountain News and journalists from around Denver fielded a host of questions regarding the future of news media. Below are a few highlights of the conversation (transcript available in full here).
GroundReport.com is a platform for the kind of journalism that has many names: hyperlocal journalism, citizen journalism, wiki journalism. Rachel Sterne's idea is to have a website where anyone can just sign up and submit articles, and become an instant citizen reporter. Submitted content goes through a plagiarism filter and a group of editors will edit before any content goes live.
Based on the number of hits and the ranking of the author, good articles get filtered to the front page, and the hope is that bad articles will stay at bay with bad rankings and scarcely any hits. Contributors are compensated based on article rankings but compensation averages only a few cents.
Af the Afghani elections are coming up this week, there are a projects focusing on the election and citizen media coverage that we like to note.
First, as Taliban has intensified violence and has threatened to disrupt the elections and "kill those who vote," the Afghani government has called for reporters to avoid coverage of violence so that Afghanis aren't scared away from polling stations. Meanwhile, associations such as the Independent Journalist Association of Afghanistan have refused to take the order and has promised to continue reporting. The ban on reporting is phrased as a "request" in English, and as "strictly forbidden" in Dari (good synopsis of ban and violence here).
Al Jazeera launched a new site today for citizens in Gaza to report incidences of various kinds in Gaza via SMS and Twitter. The deployment is using Ushahidi and Souktel's SMS gateway, one of the few able to deliver SMS in Gaza. In this latest citizen journalism effort, Al Jazeera is both mapping reports from its own journalists and incidences reported by the public. So far, there are few citizens texting in, however; the majority of the content consists of Al Jazeera news reports for now. Al Jazeera and its new media team are doing a great job, however, in their labs -- very impressive innovations coming from the Arab satellite news service and its New Media folks like Ryaad M, for example.
The news is coming. Or at least that's what Guy Berger titled his Knight News Challenge project, which aims to connect diverse populations in Grahamstown, South Africa to news through mobile phone- based citizen journalism and news delivery. Berger, head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University was recently awarded a Knight News Challenge grant, which funds "digital information innovations that transform community life."
Berger talked with MobileActive about the project. "This is hyperlocal," he said. "It is to expand the town square of Grahamstown in terms of information and opinion flows." The "citizen journalists" will be high school students. In August, Berger's group will conduct workshops with 80 students separated into classes of 20. Each class will have two Saturday workshops about what it means to be a citizen journalist. The students will then submit news stories via SMS.
This February 5th isn't just any Tuesday in the United States. It's Super Tuesday, so named because 23 of the 50 states are holding presidential primaries, making it the contest that could potentially determine the all-important presidential Democratic and Republican nominees.
Television station MTV (Music Video Television) has an innovative new effort to get out the youth vote and merge citizen journalism with mainstream media. The effort, dubbed "Street Team '08," is made possible through mobile phones.
Groundviews is now featuring its latest content on mobile devices. Go to http://groundviews.mofuse.mobi/ to access articles from the award-winning Sri Lanka citizen journalism site on a mobile phone. Groundviews mobile works with Blackberry’s, the iPhone and all recent Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung and other mobile phones capable of and set up for Internet access. Our site does not require 3G or high speed connectivity and is not tied to any mobile operator or service.
Groundviews - http://www.groundviews.org - Sri Lanka's first and award winning citizens journalism website features ideas, opinions and analyses on humanitarian issues, media freedom, human rights, peace, democratic governance and constitutional reform.