The Guardian rounds up the best comments, questions and answers from our recent live chat on tomorrow's journalist – what tools and skills will they need to survive and thrive?
As we keep on hearing from various guest speakers that come to the Centre for Journalism mobile phones have a future in the news industry.
Well here’s one of the latest sites to use mobile phone technology for breaking news... It’s called Audioboo and it has been called the Twitter for people who want their voices heard.
In fact it might come in useful for our radio news day, this Friday, as a method of sending in news clips for editing. The obvious drawback is that it’s only for you iPhone kids.
An example of its usage can be seen through the creation of this map for the G20 protests. It shows the areas where the boos were coming from.
I do think this is going to be an exciting one to watch - I like what they’re attempting with it and their blog makes an interesting read.
Also, this blog illustrates its potential use for journalism.
In other news, this animation - Newspapers vs the Internet - might make you smile.
Failing that, this certainly will… (What is it? Well you’ll have to click it to find out)
Now where did I put that revision...
Some of the audio is just about good enough quality for radio news packages. The problem, as so often with amateur reporting, is the content. I was interested in Vice President Biden's visit to Pristina, but the bloke who uploaded his commentary about it told me nothing of value. Why was Biden in Kosovo? What did he do there? Who did he meet ? The technology works and it could provide a wonderful resource for radio reporters, but unless people use it to convey accurate information it is little more than a toy.
Agreed. However, Tim, your point is the fundamental problem with all of this 'citizen journalism' - most of such journalism (which is often on a micro-local level) is constantly without significant evidence, research and will always be more of a rambling that gets published. Same issues are with Twitter, blogs and various other internet resources - quality.