Final Presentation

On Wednesday, December 8th, at 12 noon the mobile journalism team showed off our research in an hour long presentation to the students and faculty of the University of Missouri. We discussed our objectives, best practices and the research our group conducted. We also discussed our recommendations for how to best continue on our research in the capstone group that follows and how the university can best incorporate our research into some of the reporting classes next semester. On Monday we will meet with some key players at all of the newsrooms affiliated with the university and give them our recommendations and work with them on a plan for the semesters to come (including our team coming in as journalism consultants next semester!).

Our final paper is nearly completed in which we will detail our entire process and our findings. Here's an excerpt from our RJI Fellow Will Sullivan's foreword to our final paper.

"Welcome to the revolution. It will be mobilized.

The cultural shift that will take place over the next 5 years is going to rattle and recreate the media and Internet as we know it. It'll come in fits and shifts and multiple, quick iterations. It will challenge our perceptions of privacy, speed, collaboration and community.

While the rush to the future is exciting and often overwhelming, most media organizations don’t have the resources or knowledge to test all the different leading-edge mobile hardware, app software and web tools out there, so we were hoping to expedite the mobile evolution and shed some guidance and best practices on what works and what doesn’t."

We were planning on live-streaming our event on UStream, but due to technical difficulties it didn't happen. We did, however, tape the event and I will be figuring out a way to put up some clips on here.

Thank you to everyone for your support!

UStream Recorder and Broadcaster

There are two different UStream applications. One is UStream Recorder and the other is UStream Broadcaster. The differences between the two are pretty self-explanatory. Both have their own uses that would benefit you in different situations.

The UStream Recorder is a good tool - it’s easy to upload videos that are in your camera roll. You can also record a video in the application but you have to be careful. If you don’t hold it the correct way the video may end up side ways or upside down when you upload it. This can happen with the camera roll videos as well. Overall, it doesn’t take long to upload to UStream and it has similar qualities to Qik. I happen to like Qik a little more. UStream is a bit laggy sometimes and the videos come out dark if you don’t have excellent lighting.

Now, UStream Broadcaster allows you to see people tweeting at you while you’re actually broadcasting live. Some people find that distracting, but it’s an interesting concept. Say you’re filming a vlog or a show; you can answer those tweets as they come up on your screen. It would be incredibly useful to cover a concert or performance. If you alert people before the actual event they can tune in and watch as you stream it. This can be a little laggy as well. As technology improves I’m sure this will stop being such a problem.

You can’t edit these videos either. So again, be careful with what you say when you’re streaming live, or if you want to upload the videos. Technically you could just edit the video in a different application, save it to your camera roll and upload it from there. That’s always an option.

To see UStream in action, check out Jennifer's election day coverage post.

Election coverage

The Mobile Journalism Tools team decided to cover the midterm elections with different live coverage applications on both Androids and iPhones. First, we deciding to live tweet the results and the experiences we had at the College Democrats watch party at The Blue Note in Downtown Columbia.

We were retweeted by KOMU 8, the local NBC affiliate the most. I was retweeted by one or two people and so was Drew Dumas, but that was it. If we would have had a better plan of attack, we could have let people know about our #comoelx hashtag (#) ahead of time and maybe it would have caught on like the #KOMUelx hashtag did. To see all of our #comoelx tweets, click here.I also experimented with both UStream and CoverItLive. First I will talk about CoverItLive. I couldn't find CoverItLive in the Droid Market, so I had to use it on the iPhone. Since we were stationed at a table for a night, I set up the Apple Wireless Keyboard to my iPhone 4 and the application wouldn't register the keyboard, but every other single application I have tried it on has worked. After I turned off my Bluetooth, I finally got the application to work, but it had all kinds of quirks (which we have heard from another capstone group). It wouldn't let me post videos or even photos sometimes because it said there wasn't enough space, but it would post audio clips, which were just as large. I could post text, but it was too glitchy to be successful. It was a good idea, but it just didn't work.

UStream also has its fair share of glitches, but it was definitely more successful. I set up both the Droid and the iPhone on the mobile tripod throughout the night to compare the two video qualities and ease of use. The Droid video quality was a lot poorer than the iPhone, but the Droid allowed you to film horizontally, which my tripod was made for. The iPhone forces you to shoot vertically. Since I put the phone in the tripod, all of my video from the iPhone is sideways. The iPhone has much clearer images, but it was really dark at The Blue Note so it kept trying to refocus and adjust on lighter flashes and images, so the video is a little weird.

I really like the concept of UStream. You have the option of recording to your phone, or going live. You can include a hashtag to appear with the chat for your channel online. This allows for conversation in multiple ways. The only real problem with using UStream on a mobile device is the sound quality. For Mizzou's Homecoming skits, the audio techs connected UStream to the main audio. You could hear the techs talking over their radios, but the sound quality was perfect and there weren't any audience mumbles. The only problem is I'm not sure you can connect a mobile device to the stereo equipment like you can a laptop. To view my UStream account and see the videos from tonight, go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/elstonjen

Here is a sample from the Droid 2. The audio quality is quite good for no external microphones, but the crowd and setting are really dark.

The only think I wish we could have changed about tonight was that I wish we would have separated to cover the Republican party also. We just really wanted to cover one aspect well and test all of the glitches out now, before we might use the applications in a real setting.