Locative journalism: recommendations for journalism schools
Friday, June 27th, 2008 Write a comment
By Hilary Powell
Our team of journalism master’s students has had an exciting and thought-provoking experience exploring “locative storytelling” in the New Media Publishing Project class at the Medill School of Journalism. In previous posts (and our downloadable report) we have provided findings and recommendations for journalists and media companies. Here are some recommendations for journalism schools:
1) Encourage students to experience audio tours. They should participate in audio tours outside the classroom to better understand how locative storytelling works.
2) Start geotagging stories in student newsrooms. If your school publishes content online, include geotags so they can be indexed and displayed through map-based (or, in the future, GPS-based) interfaces.
3) Emphasize audio skills early. Provide techniques classes and professional equipment. Encourage students to create audio-based stories as an alternative story requirement or complement to print stories.
4) Build up mobile offerings in student newsrooms. On sites displaying student-published work, offer mobile alerts that people can subscribe to. This can eventually progress to GPS-triggered storytelling.
5) Encourage students to create geography-based stories with an interface other than Google Maps. One example is the MapsAlive authoring platform that lets users make any map interactive.
6) Use Twitter or other mobile social networking/microblogging sites to keep student reporters communicating with each other. If students use Twitter or similar services in their daily lives, they may be more inclined to think of new ways to tell stories using mobile or location-based technologies.
7) Increase emphasis on photojournalism. On portable devices, photographs can complement audio effectively when video will not.
8) Offer classes in which students innovate and create new forms of journalism, media products and storytelling. In other words, classes like the one we have just completed.
9) Explore partnerships with new location-based services such as Loopt and JotYou.
10) Explore partnerships with other schools, such as digital media arts school FlashPoint Academy, to teach media production tools. Students need more hands-on instruction in these tools but this kind of instruction is not necessarily best provided by journalism faculty.
11) Seek opportunities for students to interact with people in the industry, such as skills workshops led by media professionals.
12) Create continuing education classes for faculty to learn the technological tools and ideas behind innovative, multimedia storytelling.
Location-based services slow to catch on in Asia
Friday, June 6th, 2008 1 CommentBy Ki Mae Heussner
Those who tout Asia as a leader in mobile telephony should note that not all kinds of mobile applications are gaining traction in the region. While it’s true that some parts of Asia-Pacific are expected to lead the mobile market over the next few years, that growth may not necessarily contribute to the acceptance of certain applications, such as (unfortunately) location-based services.
A recent TNS Global Telecoms Insight study on mobile device usage in the Asia-Pacific region found that, while mobile operators have started to offer a number of GPS and location-based services (LBS), they’re only catching on in a few markets.
Although 53 percent of respondents said they had access to location-based services, only 3 percent said they had used the service. In Japan, location-based services reached 13 percent and in Taiwan LBS reached 10 percent.
The top four features in the Asia-Pacific region were SMS (used by 88 percent of respondents), games (71 percent), cameras (61 percent) and multimedia messaging services (48 percent).
A 2007 report released by research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, however, suggested that location-based services in Asia would grow alongside the introduction of mash-up services and an increase in mobile advertising.
The report indicated that the market across 13 Asia-Pacific economies was worth $291.7 million in 2006 and would reach $447 million by the end of 2009.
Japan and Korea, the report said, were the most developed LBS markets, accounting for 92 percent of total revenues in the region.
Demand in other parts of Asia-Pacific has been stifled by privacy concerns, the lack of advanced GPS-enabled handsets, and a lack of an encouraging mobile eco-system and user interest.
Worldwide, though, some analysts project that 2008 will be the year mobile location-based services take off. Research giant Gartner says global subscriptions in LBS are expected to rise by nearly 168 percent this year, driven by increasing numbers of GPS-enabled phones and substantial investments in navigation technologies by heavyweights such as Nokia. Revenue is predicted to jump from $485.1 million in 2007 to $1.3 billion in 2008.
Annette Zimmerman, a research analyst at Gartner, said, “Growth [in location-based services] now will be stimulated by the arrival of mobile phones with built-in, precise location-sensing and the arrival of new service providers, like Google and Nokia, with [their] service offerings, keen to exploit geographic and positioning strategies.”
Exploring Mediascapes
Thursday, April 17th, 2008 Write a CommentBy Hope Needles
Last week, the LoJo team began exploring a fairly new technology developed by HP Labs called Mediascapes. Mediascapes, a game-based application, incorporates GPS motion-sensing technology to tell a story that is often directly linked to its location. Recently, I had the opportunity to test this program and to learn about its latest developments from HP Labs in Bristol, England, at the second annual Mediascapes Conference in December 2007. The two-day conference helped me consider some of the applications that can exist for Mediascapes and that extend well beyond the gaming industry. Read the rest of this entry…
