In my MA Online Journalism session this week I’ll be looking at mobile journalism. As part of that, below I’ve compiled 4 lists of things I think a mobile journalist needs: hardware, software, systems, and mindset. I’d welcome anything you can add to this.

In the spirit of mobile journalism, I will also be streamed the session live on Bambuser from 9am UK time on Thursday, for around 45 mins – if you can join us online and chip in, please do. I’ve embedded the player below (skip past it for the lists of things a mojo needs).

A note from the comments

Some comments rightfully point out that this list is potentially terrifying. I’m not suggesting you need all these things – my favourite response said that you needed a Posterous blog, a smartphone, and lots of batteries, and I’d go along with that. But here are a whole lot of potential things to explore when you get itchy…

Mobile journalism – hardware

• Smartphone with camera, video, audio, unlimited data plan
• Digital camcorder, e.g. Flip, Kodak Zi8
• Digital dictaphone or Zoom
• Portable mic
• Portable mini tripod?
• Batteries (including extra mobile phone battery)
• Extension lead – and chargers
• Portable chargers, e.g. solar
• Bluetooth keyboard
• Mifi and/or 3G dongle
• Eyefi card
• Wifi laptop or netbook with webcam

Mobile journalism – the software

• Apps for your phone and services you can email or text to. Good ones include…
• Shozu
• Spinvox – blog via voice
• iBlogger
• Audioboo
• Twitterfone
• Twitvid
• Twibble – GPS twitter updates
• Zyb – synchronise contacts and calendar
• Opera Mini; on iPhone use bookmarklets on Safari like ‘Read Later’, ‘Post with Tweetie’, ‘Save to Delicious’, ‘Share on Tumblr’
• Qik, Bambuser, 12seconds – streaming video
• Posterous – blog via email
• ZoneTag – geotag images
• JoikuSpot – create wifi hotspot from 3G phone
• Google Maps

Mobile journalism – the systems

• Email must be set up – more than one account as backup (Google Mail occasionally goes down)
• Useful phone no.s, e.g. Twitter, Twitterfone
• Useful emails, e.g. Twitpic, YouTube, Twittermail, Facebook, Posterous etc.
• Map of wifi hotspots
• Map of mobile and 3G coverage
• Blog via email or text – Postie plugin/Posterous/app/etc.
• Pulling RSS feeds from Twitter/Flickr/YouTube/Posterous/Tumblr/Google Docs
• Embedded players for livestreaming/liveblogging
• Geotagging information for mapping
• Mashups
• Preparation: web-based video/audio/image editors
• Collaboration – preparing the users, hashtags, tweeting, feedback

Mobile journalism – the mindset

• ‘Always-on’ approach – tweet on the go; share images; stream quick video. Think humour, art, quirky, as much as ‘news’. Prepare yourself and users for when you need it.
• Play with new mobile tools – follow TechCrunch etc.
• Try out mobile apps
• Find the stories that are not online
• Be part of a mobile community – follow people like @documentally @alisongow @ilicco @patphelan @moconews
• Be creative with mobile, not formulaic: the rules aren’t written yet

Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom WordPress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move.

To start a blog all a user has to do is send an email to post@posterous.com.

That’s it.

A blog is created for them with their email as the first post (the subject line is the title).

It gets better: if you email photos, video or audio it is automatically embedded in a Flash player. Link to a YouTube, Google Video, Justin.TV, Vimeo or Omnisio video and it’s automatically embedded as well. Send more than one image and a gallery is created. PDFs, PowerPoint and Word documents are also embedded using previous SFTW Scribd.

As for the conversation? You can have comments emailed to you, and can reply by simply responding back to the email. And the site has social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users if you register.

TechCrunch also reports that “new features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.” This last piece may well persuade me to move off WordPress. It’s that good.

As for its business model: ReadWriteWeb says the site was founded with “about $15,000 in seed capital. Posterous is currently free and plans to start selling premium features in the future.”

The one downside is a potential vulnerability to fake posting by people using masked email addresses, although they would have to know what the address was first (I’m using a bespoke email address for mine).

Here are just some implications that spring to mind:

• if you meet someone you think would be a great blogger, just ask them to send an email to that address, and forward the reply (which tells you what your blog address is).
• If they have a document you’d like to put online, do the same (in other words, easy webpage creation rather than blog creation)
• There is massive potential for blogging on the move – particularly the ability to email replies to comments.
• This also makes group blogging much easier, as you simply have to register all contributors’ email addresses.
• For example: record a phonecall interview on your N95, then email it to the blog.
• You could set up an email feed from another blog using Feedburner or xFruits to cross-post into Posterous
• Or simply forward emails, e.g. press releases, email interviews, that you want your readers to see verbatim.

And I’m sure there are plenty of other possibilities – let me know your ideas.

Read more ‘Something for the weekend’ posts

UPDATE: Jon Hickman has been putting it through its paces and has a list of pros and cons:

1. It doesn’t create a hyperlink in my bio where I have placed a URL

2. It doesn’t pull in feeds or sets from flickr intelligently, and create a gallery

3. Creating a gallery via email is difficult because it will be limited by how many pictures you can fit through your mail server in one go

4. Why doesn’t it even pull in individual flickr images when I post it a URL (it does this with YouTube after all).  The only way to do it is to get a link that resolves .jpg, ie click onto the image page and extract the link from the options at the bottom

5. once I have made a gallery I can’t change the pictures

6. where’s the themes????

good things;

1. easy

2. multiple email addresses support

3. rss feed – so might be useful to aggregate content that is emailable and pull into other things (like the project I’m doing with Jezz…)

My live coverage of the Investigative Journalism Goes Global conference seemed to polarise opinion among the Twitterati. The Guardian’s Neil McIntosh and Charles Arthur, the BBC’s Bill Thompson, and Pete Ashton all unsubscribed from my updates – and those were just the ones I know about.

At the same time, however, a number of other people tweeted their thanks for the coverage, including Mark Comerford, Alison Gow, Nick Booth and Mark Hamilton.

Summed up in two tweets, the debate went something like this:

“nmcintosh: Sorry @paulbradshaw – Twitter isn’t the place for liveblogging. Am unsubbing.”

“gmarkham: @paulbradshaw I like it. easy enough to ignore those that don’t tweak something in the mental wiring.”

But was this “liveblogging”? For me, it wasn’t. If I was liveblogging, I’d do it on a blog. Perhaps you could call this livemicroblogging.

Why didn’t I liveblog? Well: been there, done that. Where would be the learning in it? I wanted to experiment with mobile phone journalism, and around the potential conversation that could be had (and that liveblogs don’t do as well) via Twitter. Here were some of the tweets that people sent:

“davidcushman: @paulbradshaw what social media does he use? [to keynote speaker John Pilger]

“davidcushman: @paulbradshaw investigative journalism is the only journalism – discuss?

“amonck: @paulbradshaw Little conference reading for you – sorry I can’t make it, shud be some City folk there http://tinyurl.com/69yc3l

“amandachapel: @paulbradshaw | De-professionalizing journalism doesn’t just reduce cost, it eliminates the genre.

“stevebridger: @paulbradshaw I spent 6 months on www.afterwilma.info – newspaper journos engaged with it. Would use Twitter now

“lalorek: @paulbradshaw Yes we do see ourselves as part of the fourth estate. Many of us believe in investigative journalism. Check www.ire.org

“lalorek: @paulbradshaw or some of the new models emerging like www.propublica.org or www.tpmmuckraker.com or www.muckety.com and many more.

Twitter lended the conversation an immediacy and access that liveblog comments simply don’t (although CoverItLive provides a halfway house).

The problem? Twitter wasn’t sending me @replies.

Well, at least it was working at all.

Things fall apart

I love things going wrong. It makes for some very useful lessons. Here are just some:

1. @replies were not reaching me – I did tweet this early on but overlooked the fact that not everyone will have seen that tweet. Solution 1: keep asking for direct messages; Solution 2: set up a twitter account taking the RSS feed of a Summize search for @paulbradshaw and feeding that through Twitterfeed. Then subscribe to text messages from that feed. Sadly Twitterfeed restricts you to a maximum of five tweets, only arriving every half hour, so there will be some limit/delay to the conversation.
2. The venue had no 3G connection or open wifi, which meant I had no internet or email access even from a mobile phone – so liveblogging was not technically possible anyway (it also meant my hopes of using livestreaming tools Qik or Bambuser bit the dust). Solution: arrange to text a blogger elsewhere.
3. Twitter overkill – yes, this must have been bloody annoying for some, and I should have set up yet another separate Twitter account for my live coverage, as Amy Gahran has (thanks Jay Rosen). But if you only have one mobile this runs the risk of you only getting messages directed at one of your Twitter accounts. In that instance, I could rely on my users to just switch me off for a while – perhaps even direct them to Twittersnooze, which will do it for you (thanks Dan Thornton and Jon Bounds).
4. I also should have hashtagged the tweets – at the time I decided not to because no one else was covering this, but for those coming into the coverage mid-stream, a tag like #IJGG would have sent a semantic signal that this was part of event coverage.

A final point: it’s well worth investing in a bluetooth keyboard for your mobile phone (no, I didn’t do all of this with my thumbs) – oh, and the ‘Cmd’ button is very useful indeed.

Let me know what you think about live coverage on Twitter – or take the online poll.