South African journalism students expand Nokia's mobile journalism experiment

Nokia's mobile journalism kits are being put to the test by students in South Africa.

After the experiment with the Nokia packages by Reuters, which gave the kit to journalists for filing news reports on the move, journalism students from the University of Witwatersrand (WITS) and first year film and television students from City Varsity school are using the same equipment to produce and distribute mobile news content.

Launched today, their Mojozone site will deliver multimedia news and event information to the mobiles of students on campus using WAP and bluetooth technology provided by South African firm DStv Mobile.

Text, images and video will feature on the site, all created and uploaded using the Nokia kits, which include a Nokia N95 8GB handset, a portable keyboard with phone stand, and a tripod.

Technical support will be provided by Nokia throughout the course, which will end in October for the WITS students.

The initiative will see students trained to capture video and audio using mobile technology, and to use web-based content management systems.

“They are also having to think very carefully about the nature of the platform they are using and how this should affect the content they produce,” Indra de Lanerolle, adjunct lecturer on the WITS journalism programme, told Journalism.co.uk.

"Are there specific kinds of news or information people will want on their cell phone? Do stories need to be of different length? They need to decide when and how to use video, rather than text or images. These are all questions that are becoming vitally important in the professional world too."

Students will explore how mobile technology can be used both to create and distribute news, de Lanerolle said.

"All of this puts them on the bleeding edge of new media. They are working with tools that many professional journalists have not yet even seen."

The growth of the mobile internet in South Africa places an added importance on this kind of training, said Indra.

“The phone to wap video platform they [the students] are using is currently on test with one of the leading newspaper groups here.

"As important though, I believe the days of journalism students deciding in which media they want to spend their career are gone. They need to have a broad understanding of all the media so that as they converge, they can adapt their content skills across any or all of these media.”

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