Catherine Adams
reports from “News : Rewired”, the latest digital journalism conference on how
Mobile Journalism and Virtual Reality are set to dominate our news.
Security was paramount at the gleaming, corporate headquarters of
MSN in Cardinal Place, central London – even going to the Ladies required a
secret code. A murmuration of delegates from across the UK news industry attended
presentations on live news, social
storytelling, smartwatches and more. As well as staff from BBC, Reuters and the
Guardian, representatives flocked to the July 16th event from digital-native
operators such as Google,
reported.ly and Mashable
Among some notable international speakers were the founder of
Smart Film School, Robb
Montgomery, who
exclusively teaches mobile journalism (MOJO) http://bit.ly/1OrUi1R and Patricia O'Callaghan,
a TV journalist with RTE, who showed reports shot and edited on her iPhone for
broadcast, using apps such as Filmicpro, Pinnacle Studio, Storehouse,
PicPlayPost and Adobe Voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baCXHiVtxT4&feature=youtu.be
The star turn was online news
guru Emily Bell, ex-Guardian, director of Tow Centre at
Columbia University, who stressed that the social media desk is now firmly fixed at the
centre of news organisations. She explained how mobile alerts are breaking news,
social media is the new “content management system,” (ie, where you publish
stuff) while “ye olde” website is the archive. This, she warned, means
publishers are potentially handing control to the 24-year-old engineer tweaking
an algorithm.
Ongoing issues such as how to verify User Generated Content and how
to protect sources threaded through the conference. Publishers are learning new
ways of coding content so that text and photos cannot be cut and pasted and
randomly shared with others. Other speakers identified the urgent need to educate
the public on what risks they’re taking using Twitter etc. Media students
should be made aware that if they geotag their pics, it gives their location
away to anyone.
There was a
smattering of marketing. Tom Quast and Nils Kaehler of Creative
Vikings demonstrated smart watches, “the most personalised tech so far,”
which the New York Times are experimenting with to publish ‘one sentence
stories’. Wearing one of these £500 devices as “an extension of yourself”, you
are never separated from the net - as whoever you’re with will be acutely aware,
whenever it ‘taps’ you on the wrist with a “micro-interaction” to let you know
your team’s scored a goal.
Virtual Reality is
the next “hottest thing”, according to Dan Pacheco on a videolink from
Syracuse University. He claimed that transporting viewers to the scene of a
story in graphic 3D would explode as a way to experience news. Although he
admitted “huge potential for misperception.” Ed Miller, from Immersiv.ly
came up with the extraordinary (and unsourced) statistic that VR would rise by
13 000% in the next few years. The FT has already created a VR version of stock
charts which you can ‘ski’ down. In the future, your avatar could ‘meet’ and
‘chat’ with avatars of people involved in the news. Reddit could be a series of
virtual rooms. Anyway, the race is on to beat the launch date of The
Oculus Rift headset in January.
Should we be
immersing people in the news? Will MOJO put yet more highly-skilled news
professionals out of jobs? Do we want to be jacked up to social media during
our most intimate moments?
In spite of the
huge implications of these latest developments in digital news, there seemed to
be little or no opportunity to debate or discuss such things at News : Rewired,
leaving participants feeling rather limp.
You can check
out the next News:Rewired events here https://www.newsrewired.com/
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