During an ongoing trial that started this summer, a group of journalists from Reuters teamed up with the Nokia Research Center to test a new mobile journalism application. Journalists used the application in the field not only to write, but also to edit, combine and file text, images, sound and live and recorded video streams. The object of this new application is specifically to enable journalists to create complete stories and file them for distribution without having to leave the scene of the action.

The technology itself is much like smart phones, combining their multimedia capabilities with text editing tools, live video streaming, as well as a GPS enabled tagging for automatic story contextualization through location, time, date, and so on. Reuters developed its own mobile editorial interface linked from the toolkit to an in-house editorial process, allowing almost instant publication.

The broader implications of this tool are clear. As stated by Timo Koskinen, project manager with Nokia Research Center, “citizen journalism is beginning to embrace a wide range of public engagement with the media, from groups of contributors organized around subject or geographic areas to the casual participant of observers who are lucky—or unlucky—enough to be at the scene of a newsworthy event.” True enough, but what happens when we finally blur the line between citizen produced and Reuters produced news? Is Reuters then more or less reliable when it is written on the run? Another question—when we begin to rely on automatically generated context, are we losing a bit of the human-driven narrative?

 Source: Nokia Press Release and Reuters Mojo

During an ongoing trial that started this summer, a group of journalists from Reuters teamed up with the Nokia Research Center to test a new mobile journalism application. Journalists used the application in the field not only to write, but also to edit, combine and file text, images, sound and live and recorded video streams. [...]