The Occupy Melbourne protest turned ugly today when police, including those from the riot, dog and mounted squads, ejected the protestors from City Square. Rapidly developing stories such as these can be effectively covered by the online journalist using just a mobile phone. Here’s how.
Mobile journalism is a particular passion of mine and today, thanks to the vast number of superb apps available, a journalist can report, produce and file from the field.
I used the video camera function on my iPhone 4 to record the vision from the location ensuring I used minimal pans, tilts and zooms to ensure the shots didn’t lag too much when viewed online. Tragically, I didn’t have a tripod. Even more tragic, I didn’t have a fully charged phone (let THAT be a lesson a learned).
Once the vision was shot, it was uploaded and edited to iMovie ($7.99 from AppStore). The editing process is ridiculously easy and allows you to diminish the volume clips (while retaining atmos), add titles, include cross dissolves and upload audio tracks and record voiceover.
Once the project is complete you can upload to a third party such as Vimeo, YouTube etc. but, without access to a WiFi network, the 3G network will create a world of pain and chances are your upload will fail. I recommend sharing the movie to your camera roll first and then using Twitter as your broadcast tool.
I uploaded my two clips to CNN’s iReport, a fantastic citizen journalist tool which also allows you to embed and share via Twitter and Facebook as well as CNN’s 72,000 other iReporters. CNN is frequently looking for videos on specific topics and they list these on their assignment desk.
The speed with which you can file a video package with audio from the field nowadays is breathtaking. Within ten minutes of the police tearing apart the Occupy Melbourne camp, I had the whole package complete and uploaded. Ten minutes!
The packages may be raw, but given that timeliness is everything in this game – particularly in a breaking news story – I think most would be happy enough with the results.
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Matt Mitchell
