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WEF 2008: Reuters looks to expand mobile journalism to all reporters and 'citizen experts'

Posted: 03/06/08 By: Laura Oliver
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Reuters' experiment with mobile journalism could be extended to all of its reporters and more 'citizen experts', the company's mobile product manager said today.

The news agency, which has trialled the use of Nokia handsets for reporting, hopes to extend the experiment to more of its journalists and 'citizen experts' - similar to the delegates at the World Economics Forum who used the devices.

Speaking to the World Editors Forum in Gothenburg, Ilicco Elia, mobile product manager for Reuters, said using more mobiles for reporting would not result in job losses as they would be used to provide an additional level of content and not replace other services.

"We would like to give a similar device to all of our journalists and we would like to give this device out to other people who are not journalists,” Elia said.

"Being able to give a device to a famous footballer for example and say, you interview someone you find interesting would make for a very different piece.

"This isn't going to replace the technology that our cameramen use. The quality isn’t good enough to replace that expert camera work," he said.

Despite aims to involve more non-journalist experts, Elia said there were not plans to hand mobile devices out to 'citizen journalists'.

Improvements to mobile technology, for example predictions by Nokia of high definition video camera on handsets in five to 10 years, would help further Reuters' experiment with mobile, Elia said.

"We want to do it as fast as we possibly can technologically. We're really interested in making sure that our work processes don’t get affected as much as possible," Elia told Journalism.co.uk.

At present the quality is not sufficient to use mobile content on all its platforms, he added.

"The devices we are using at the moment are giving us pretty good results for our web properties.

"I’m not sure that the broadcast quality of them is up to scratch. However, there are times when you can accept a slightly lower quality in the imagery because of the content it provides.

"But there’s definitely need for the full quality video that we deliver to our broadcast clients."

* Video below shows Elia being interviewed by a Mojo from a Swedish media magazine using a Nokia 95 phone streaming live video to their website via Bambuser.