The newsroom in your pocket Covering breaking news with a mobile phone

“Singularity”

“The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller than the one at MIT in 1965. What used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket.

“What fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.”

--Futurist Ray Kurzweil

Some stats

27 Cellphones per second.

4 Babies per second

•Most successful big media company in the world•Very forward-thinking•Aggressive approach to new technology

Schibsted – Fast Bear to Market

Faster Than TV

VG.no had the video 6 hours before the TV news channels could get their video to the station, ingested, edited, v/o, etc.

Organizing Chaos

MISTAKES:

Many voices

Logistics

Getting material to office

New Ways to Find Sources

Facebook:

Students wrote of their experiences

Way to find friends of witnesses, victims

Not Always Reliable

Rumor: Indian gov’t asking Twitter to be shut down because it was being used by terrorists to track cops

Reality: rumor spread by high school junior in Boston

Shelby Star

Reuters

Hierarchical Information Flow

Question: How often, and under what conditions, do you interact with your readers?

Wildfires – Urgent Need for Info

Iran: Twitter + Mobile + Facebook

“Hamed” is an Iranian refugee living in the Netherlands, and it was from there that he posted the death of 27-year-old Neda Salehi Afgha Soltani. "I am no hero," Hamed said. "The real hero is my friend who risked his life making the video." Facebook friend A Facebook friend, that is. Hamed has never met the author of the film except on the social networking site.

Readers Do It Themselves

For the Code Geeks…