April 05, 2011
Teaching mobile journalism: It’s not just the tools, it’s the mindset
Mobile is playing an increasingly important role in how people access the internet and keep up with what’s happening. How can journalism schools prepare the next generation of journalists to use mobile tools and media well for reporting, publishing, and engagement?
Staci Baird, a journalism instructor at San Francisco State University and an instructor for KDMC@USC’s upcoming Mobile Symposium, shares some lessons and ideas from her experience teaching mobile journalism…
By Amy Gahran
In 2010, Baird taught Contemporary News Media—SFSU’s first-ever mobile reporting class. She designed the course curriculum with two goals in mind:
- Students should learn how to use their mobile phone as a tool for gathering, producing and publishing digital content.
- Students should be able to understand the opportunities that exist for mobile media and recommend options for mobile content products.
“It’s important to cover both bases: Mobile tools for reporting and publishing, and mobile as a medium,” said Baird. “Last semester, we talked about the mobile product itself, not just the tools. Journalism students need to learn to think about how media is changing, the different roles it’s playing in people’s lives—and what they can do with that.”
Baird emphasized that, so far, mobile mostly serves as a supplement to print, broadcast, and computer-based media. “It’s not a replacement technology, and that’s why I think it works,” she said. “So it’s important for students to compare the strengths and weakness of mobile media vs. all those other established channels.”
Such comparisons bring to light useful history lessons. “When you look at what most news organizations are doing so far with mobile today, it’s mostly shovelware. That’s the same mistake they made in the 1990s with the web—and it’s pretty easy to show today’s journalism students how mistakes like that have hurt the news industry.”
She also points out that many news organizations are relying on third-party services (such as app development firms) to deliver their mobile presence, often because they’re “stuck with crappy content management systems that they can’t really work with.” This situation tends to encourage the shovelware approach—rather than innovative, effective uses of mobile media.
“I try to teach students how to keep their minds open to possibilities,” said Baird.
But for mobile media, understanding what those possibilities are means learning about market research and product development.
“I have them take a step back and figure out their target audience: Who are they? Where are they? What kinds of mobile devices do they have? How do they use them? Market research surveys, even simple ones, can help. I don’t think we teach that as much as we should in most journalism schools,” said Baird.
Student-run news outlets like SFSU’s Golden Gate Xpress can be another opportunity to teach mobile awareness and skills.
“This semester, all of our Xpress reporters are on Twitter. Some use it more than others,” she said. “Recently we sent out them to cover the March 2 Day of Action for Public Education protests. One student reporter posted a photo via Twitpic, and included @xpressnews in that tweet, so our social media editor saw it. The editor was using Storify to compile live coverage—so he was able to quickly include that photo in his curated coverage.”
But even if students don’t have Twitter, they can file photos and other coverage from their phones via e-mail, multimedia messaging (MMS), or e-mail-enabled blogging tools such as Posterous.
Part of learning mobile news skills is nurturing good habits, especially for covering breaking news they encounter in the field. “You have to learn how to act like a sheriff in wild west,” said Baird. “You see something happening, and you instantly whip out your phone and know what to do with it to get the story out. You’re never really off-duty.”
Baird recommends having journalism students identify and analyze competitors to your school’s student news outlets, and suggest ways to use mobile as a competitive advantage.
Implementing mobile strategies for student news outlets is the tough part, said Baird. “That’s where you need to start collaborating with other departments such as computer science, or maybe marketing or business classes to do the execution.”
Often, it’s hard to add a mobile journalism class to the curriculum. So Baird recommends finding ways to teach mobile skills and mindset through assignments and exercises in other journalism classes.
One exercise Baird has found especially useful is to teach students how to live-tweet: “Just have them tweet their notes to your lecture, right there in class. It’s fairly futile to try to keep them from using their phones in class anyway, so you might as well have them do it in a way that adds to the lesson,” she said.
“Give them a hashtag for the class and explain how to use it, and give some examples of what good live-tweeting looks like. Then, during class, keep a projector running from your computer, to display the current results for the class hashtag. When they see the instant results, and when they see what their classmates are posting, they learn pretty quickly.”
This approach offers a bonus, said Baird: “While they’re busy learning how to live-tweet, they probably aren’t using their phones to text their friends as much.”
The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Comments
Hi Amy and Staci,
Great article. Thanks for sharing the thoughts.
It’s nice to see someone “cover both bases”: the new mobile tools used for reporting in the field *and* mobile as its own distinct medium.
I’m curious whether you had a take on the mobile-first mindset internationally, particularly in countries in which the desktop to mobile shift is even more accelerated than it is in the States.
-Corey
By ctakahashi, 04/06/11 at 1:33 pm
Hi Corey, first, thanks for the props!
As far as my “take” on the mobile-first mindset in the international arena, I definitely think we (in the U.S.) can learn a lot from what is (has been) happening. In many countries people went straight from having no computer to having a mobile phone with internet access.
Great stats here: http://mobithinking.com/stats-corner/global-mobile-statistics-2011-all-quality-mobile-marketing-research-mobile-web-stats-su
For example, 70 percent of mobile web users in Egypt never or infrequently use the desktop web. In India it’s 59 percent, South Africa 57 percent. Talk about a “mobile-first” mindset! For these people, mobile is it.
I think the media outlets in these countries have more experience with mobile than we do in the U.S. I also think they probably have a pretty good idea about what works and what doesn’t, and I don’t think they’re afraid to experiment with mobile platforms. Case in point -> http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/ they have a decent mobile site experience (iPhone browser anyway) AND they have an iPad-friendly experience. I’m sure there are more great examples, if only I knew a little more Spanish. 
By Girljournalist, 04/07/11 at 5:35 pm
I want to buy a mobile for my MUM,but which brand will be good/ can you give me some suggestions/
By thomas sabo shop online, 04/08/11 at 6:44 am
I appreciate the new insights, and thanks for the links above!
It’s going to be interesting to see how the momentum of mobile plays out around the world—not just audience growth, but, as you note, in terms of leading mobile-media development, too. That story’s definitely an international story.
All best,
Corey
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By johncena, 04/10/11 at 9:55 pm
It’s going to be interesting to see how the momentum of mobile plays out around the world—not just audience growth,
i real agree with it.
By thomas sabo shop online, 04/12/11 at 12:24 am
the same to that i have asked,i have decided to buy nokia for what can getting the network online.
By thomas sabo shop online, 04/15/11 at 6:22 am
I totally agree is a interesting debate though…
By Kelster, 04/18/11 at 3:39 am
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