The era of the mobile reporter
How has mobile technology changed the life of a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reporter?
If you'd asked me that a couple of years ago, I would have said very little. I spent twenty years as a television reporter, mainly covering business, and while I was surrounded by technology on the road - from camera crews, to satellite trucks and mobile editing - very little of it was under my control.
But in the last couple of years I've become a multimedia technology journalist and it has become imperative for me to have a lot more gadgets about me - to keep in touch, do my job outside the office, and simply for the hell of it. After all, my cynical colleagues in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Economics Unit keep asking me when I am going to stop playing around with mobile phones and social networks and get a proper job, so I might as well play up to the stereotype.
For me, the most important gadgets have been those that allow me to get online anywhere and everywhere. First I have two mobile phones which give me permanent access to my email - one for my corporate messages, another which picks up my personal email.
Over the last eighteen months, I've taken a laptop with me just about anywhere. For a while that could only get online when I was in reach of a wifi network, which is still surprisingly difficult to find in many places. But now I've acquired a mobile broadband dongle which fills in some of the gaps, though again there are plenty of areas without the 3g coverage needed to get online.
Along with two phones and a laptop, my kitbag also contains a small, very simple video camera, good enough to capture pictures if there's no professional camera crew with me, but not really fit (in my hands at least) for proper broadcasting. I also have a digital audio recorder for radio work, and my most exciting new gadget, a digital pen which records conversations and matches the recordings to my scribblings in a notebook.
As well as simply communicating with the office and scanning various internet feeds, I'm using a whole range of applications on the road. There is, which allows you to broadcast almiost live from a mobile phone, or , which allows you to record and upload audio very efficiently. Both of these are interesting new tools which still have to prove their value for professional broadcasting.
I am more inclined to turn to , a photo-sharing website, as an easy way to get images to editors at ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ TV Centre. On my laptop I have some free software called which allows me to top and tail a piece of audio, which I can then send to London using a marvellous browser-based service which the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ set up a few years back. And I'm making possibly excessive use of - I'm by the way - to promote my work, to get early warnings of any breaking stories in my field, and to appeal for information.
All this connectivity does, however, have its downside. I spend a lot of time when I'm out reading and deleting emails or checking out my various social networks. Sometimes I wonder whether I would be better off turning off the phones and getting out a book.
The result of all this technology is that I can, in theory, do a lot of my work away from the office, without the co-operation of colleagues. But somehow it doesn't quite work like that. I still find you need to look your boss in the eye from time to time - and gossip with the rest of the office. Even if the only question they want to ask me is how to work their shiny new mobile phones and which browser I would recommend.
Rory Cellan-Jones is Technology Correspondent, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News
Comment number 1.
At 11th Jun 2009, cyberdoyle wrote:nice to see new tech being used by reporters like Rory, too many still haven't grasped the advantages, and they are gonna be left behind in digitalbritain!
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