March 2016 4 9
M
oJoCon – the Mobile Journalism
Conference which debuted in
Dublin last year – has its roots
almostadecadeago,whenGlen
Mulcahy,thenworkingwithRTE
Nuacht,beganexperimentingwiththecamera
onhisNokiaN93smartphone.
"Video quality was atrociously bad, photo-
graphs were tiny, 1Mb was seen as huge, it was
very much in its infancy", recalls Mulcahy, now
RTE’s head of innovation. "We were experi-
menting with that around the time Reuters had
deployed the same tools to their journalists in
the UK to create content for websites”.
A handful of stories was produced to an
acceptablebroadcastqualityusingthemobile
devices,andMulcahystartedkeepingtrackof
otherbroadcasterswhoweredoingthesame.
"I thought, we need to bring everyone together,
talk about what we're doing, and that was the
birth of MoJoCon”.
Fromthosebeginnings,andnetworksbuilt
upthroughCircom,theEuropeanAssociation
ofRegionalBroadcasters,MoJoConhasevolved
intoa "leading international media conference
focusing on mobile journalism, mobile content
creation, mobile photography and new technol-
ogy all in one event”.
Mulcahymaybeanadvocatefornewtechnol-
ogy,buthedoesn'texpectRTÉreporterswillbe
carryingsmartphonesandselesticksbythe
endofthedecade.
"People still expect a particular kind of look
when they turn on the television. You can't do
sports coverage on mobile, for example - you
need those broadcast cameras, powerful zoom,
all those expensive things. That said, there is
very interesting case study, a station in Luxem-
bourg, Léman Bleu, uses mobile to create
content for their TV news. I think they are very
brave to go this early”.
"You will still see cameramen, you will still
see satellite trucks in five years time, not jour-
nalists with selfie sticks. There are times when
mobile works, but mobile is not mature enough
yet to do 100% of the work”.
Wherehedoesseeopeningsfornewtech-
nologytoexpandareinnon—broadcastmedia
outlets,fromnewspaperstoindependentpod-
andvideo-casts.
"There are a few case studies in the Irish
Times where I was absolutely blown away by
some of the stuff they were able to do. They
also very cleverly decided to upskill all their
press photographers who were interested in
doing it into shooting video with their DSLR
cameras. So you have a new aesthetic. You def-
initely have better, although not necessarily
radically more expensive, cameras and you
also have some of the journalists who
responded and went out shooting stuff with
their phones”.
"You don’t need a broadcast-quality camera
to produce content that going to be delivered
(back) onto mobile phones. I'm
more and more coming to the
opinion that there is a mobile
ecosystem where we create on
the mobile phone, edit on
mobile phone, and deliver to
mobile phones”.
Newtechnologies,andtheabil-
itytoproduceprogrammingandnews
quicklyandcheaply,alsohaveimplica-
tions for how RTÉ covers different
communities,Mulcahybelieves.
"In the UK, there’s been a con-
certed effort by the
BBC over the
last 12 to 18
months to try
and encourage
hyperlocal sites. There
is a UK government ini-
tiative where you can
get a modest fund to
basically try and get it off the ground. So
there’s more that the government here could
do to encourage that level of local community
content”.
"This is a device that most people have in
their pocket. Maybe not everyone has a top-of-
the-line Android or whatever, but lots of people
have smartphones that can do pretty decent
video, reasonably decent video”.
"There is potential to give community-group
newsletters, the ones that get stuffed on A4
sheets through letterboxes, a mobile angle.
We could really energise community activism
at grass roots level by showing them what you
can do with video on mobile”.
Lookingtothefuture,astechnologies(and
screens)merge,Mulcahycanseeapointwhere
RTÉ produces video and audio not just for
broadcast,butfortheweb,andforwebrst.As
technologiesmature,thereisnostrictreason
why,forexample,anewreportcompiledduring
themid-afternoonshouldhavetowaituntilthe
Ninenewstobeseen,whenitcanbeimmedi-
ately streamed to desktop computers or
phones.
Mojocon no Mojo con
Print and web journalism will benefit
from mobile-phone video
Gerard Cunningham interviews Glen Mulcahy
One pioneering station in
Luxembourg, Léman Bleu,
already uses mobile to
create content for its TV
news
RTE head of innovation Glen Mulcahy at the first MoJoCon -
Mobile Journalism Convention - in Dublin last year.
Photo by permission of Sir Cam Photos

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