Mobile media and the journalism curriculum

This paper examines participatory journalism models emerging from mobile phone content,and their application to the university journalism curriculum. Mobile phones are an emerging media production platform, combining audio/visual recording tools with networked communication. The utility and ubiquity of these devices, and an emerging non-professional production culture, highlights the blurring of distinctions between media consumption and production afforded by networked digital technology. The mobile telephone has become a significant instrument in the development of this journalistic form.Placing mobile communication technology equipped with still and video cameras into the hands of the public has given rise to a new form of audio/visual coverage of news events.Recent examples include the 2004 South-east Asian tsunami, the 2005 London transport bombings, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in which professional newscoverage drew heavily on the resources of mobile phone-equipped eyewitnesses. The ease and speed with which such images can be captured and disseminated around the world is changing the traditional news cycle. News organisations now regularly call on their audiences to contribute mobile phone content of newsworthy events as soon as they occur, and audiences have become equally accepting of grainy images and poor audio as a component of mainstream news coverage.Would journalism education and training benefit from embracing the theory and practice of participatory journalism evolving from mobile phone use? How might future journalists benefit from understanding how the news production capacity is now distributed among their audience. This paper will report on a pilot survey of graduating journalism students and their use of mobile telephones, and considers what aspects of the emerging mobile content production model may have application to the teaching of journalism in the university setting.