Tools To Make You A Mobile News Reporter

As New Orleanians, we usually get our stream of news from a small array of local media sources.  Because our city is small, those media outlets dominate the markets they are in.  But given the advancement of mobile devices, anyone can turn themselves into a mobile new station.  With nothing but his iPhone and a twitter client, Tom Martin went on a five day love fest where he took photos and sent tweets out to people on the Internet, showing them Mardi Gras from a family man’s point of view.  Or take Aura “Fedora” Shannon, who uses Hipcast to interview guests that are touring New Orleans and also plans to use it during Halloween.

Cellphones are making it easier for the average person, local bloggers, or even news outlets to embed themselves in an event, conference, or outing to send updates about what’s going on around them.  Armed with a fully charged cellphone and a data plan we’ll look at a couple of applications and services that can turn you into a mobile news reporter.

Live Blogging

Posterous

Ask the average person to setup their own blog and you might get a strange and confused look.  Tell that same person to e-mail you a message with a photo attached and they will likely have no problem.  Posterous, a blogging service that allows you to publish blog posts with the ease of sending an e-mail, is arguably the easiest blogging platform around.  It lets you e-mail messages, photos, mp3 clips, videos and other files to post@posterous.com.  With no sign up required a URL is automatically generated for you so you can began blogging.  A great tool for live blogging an event, because you can send off your updates to an e-mail address and let their system worry about the rest.

Live Tweeting

Twitter Clients

Similar to live blogging, live tweeting is where a person sends out numerous twitter updates about a particular event using a Twitter hashtag so it can be indexed later in real time search.  While we can’t say one twitter client is better than the other, please know that there are many ways to tweet and a variety of apps out there for different phones.  Live tweeting gives users the ability to post updates faster than live blogging and makes your tweets searchable giving more power to the user.

Taking Notes

Evernote

Maybe your not quick on the draw with every single post/tweet, and you would like to take notes to compile them for later on.  Evernote can be thought of as the master note taker, allowing you can take typed, voice, and photo notes and then organize them in a way so you can backtrack your ideas.  The service evens allows you to sync up your notes to a cloud service where you can access them later on from a computer.

Live Streaming/Video

Qik

What’s better than pictures?  Talking pictures!  More and more cellphones now have the capabilities to record video and then share them on popular social networking websites.  Qik goes one step further allowing you to stream live video from your mobile phone.  After you finish your video can be uploaded to Facebook, YouTube, & Twitter.

Mobile Podcasts

AudioBoo

For the podcaster on the go, AudioBoo allows you to record a voice memo on your phone and then upload it directly to their website.  Others are able to listen, comment, or follow your profile for future podcasts.

Personal Sound Recorder

Google Voice

Digital sound recorders can be costly if you want to record an interview.  It also be cumbersome to install the software and download the audio files off the devices.  Luckily Google Voice provides a free and painless way for you to record a phone call interview.  Using Google Voice, an individual can call your number, pressing the number 4 on your phone’s keypad initiates a notification to both parties that the conversion is now being recorded.  Simply hang up your phone once your done and you’ll have an audio file that can you can download or embed for later review.

Depending on what type of cellphone you use, your user expereince may be different as some services utilize a mobile version and others and be downloaded as an application.  But these services and many others can be used by anyone to become an embedded journalist.  Now all you have to do is make sure your phone is fully charged before sending out all that user generated content to the intrawebs.