Chapter 5: Briggs “Journalism Next”
February 22, 2012
You can’t really talk about journalism without mentioning the power of the smartphone and going mobile. In our Online Journalism class we’ve had two speakers discuss the importance of mobile journalism, from Steve Buttry and Mark Potts.
I check my Twitter every morning the same way some people read the paper every morning. Twitter is my morning paper–and I do it on my phone. Here’s a little screenshot from my own timeline on my phone. (I use Tweetbot, so worth the $3 I spent on it).
What I love about it is that I can read news from different sources and then have Simon Pegg sprinkled in the middle of it.
But mobile phones aren’t obviously just for news using Twitter. You can blog, send emails, post comments to different sites and other endless options.
Videos, as mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, are essential to all news broadcasts as it delivers so much more than still images. I can send a video straight to YouTube from my phone without ever leaving the camera app.
Even more options for a photo!
Heck, I could even finish this post on my phone if I wanted to!
And now you know that I started this blog post at 6:52 p.m. and the last screenshot was taken at nearly 11 p.m. Woops.
What blew me away a little bit was that the average of a person’s first phone was eight. EIGHT! I got my first phone for my 14th birthday and I got my first smartphone when I was 19 and I paid for it myself thank you very much.
I think chapter five can be summed up with the fact that anyone with a phone can be a journalist if they so choose to be. The opportunities are certainly there and many have taken advantage.
