LOJOCONNECT.COM
location-based technology + journalism

By Hilary Powell

The final report from Team LoJo — six master’s students exploring “locative storytelling” at the Medill School of Journalism — is now available for download (a 45-page report, plus appendices, in a single 3MB PDF file). Over the next few days, we’ll highlight our key findings and recommendations.

First, the most significant findings:

1) Geography is key

Geography is a key tool for making content relevant to media users. It is becoming a powerful interface for information search and organization. News organizations are increasingly geotagging, or embedding geographic data in stories, so they can be easily identified by their relevant locations. Rather than searching by keyword, people can now browse a digital map for relevant information for a particular location. The Google Earth-New York Times partnership is a powerful example of this. Also, Google’s news aggregation service now allows users to quickly see all the stories for a given geographical location. Geotagging is not only used by news organizations. It is also catching on with consumers, who are tagging photos within photo sharing sites such as Flickr. Driving this trend, many new cameras allow for automatic geotagging of photos.

2) Mobile technology is ideal for geographically relevant content

Key advantages of mobile devices include portability, location awareness that can be used to customize content, and the fact that people nowadays almost always have their cell phones with them. Increasingly, cell phones and other mobile devices will include GPS and other technologies that “know” the user’s location. This will make it increasingly possible to target content to users based on their location or geographic interests. Our experience with locative stories delivered to portable devices has taught us that this kind of storytelling, at its best, can be extremely compelling.

3) American media companies have been slow to develop mobile content and adapt to cultural changes

U.S. media companies are lagging foreign competitors. For example, in April 2008, French company Orange launched Read & Go, a portable electronic newspaper kiosk with access to several different newspapers. In 2006, Belgian newspaper de Tijd became the first paper in the world to publish on epaper – flexible electronic paper that can be dynamically updated. Meanwhile, foreign news media established mobile newspaper versions several years ahead of major American media companies. Cultural and technological changes have made consumers increasingly become “urban nomads” who are not tied to their offices and homes. But American media companies have been slow to develop content for mobile devices and to capitalize on this trend.

4) Cumbersome content delivery has limited the market for mobile and location-based stories

The process of getting content into a portable device can be time-consuming and often requires multiple steps. Podcasts must be downloaded from the Web, then transferred to an MP3 player. Cellular phones offer the potential of immediate content downloads, but most users are limited to content distributed through their wireless carrier. Mediascapes must also be downloaded, and can run only on a minority of portable devices. Google Earth offers a compelling user experience but requires a separate software download. The demand for location-based content will increase as the technological barriers fade away – eventually allowing people to obtain multimedia content on demand or automatically based on their location.

5) Young adults are avid users of mobile technology, and are likely to further embrace mobile content as social networking moves to portable devices

Mobile technology’s value to young adults will only increase as social networks go mobile. Young adults also tend to be more tech savvy, early adopters and less likely to worry about privacy issues and location tracking because they have grown up in a world with Facebook and other applications that make people’s private lives very public.

6) Newsrooms have resources that could already be used for locative storytelling

Mobile journalists are proliferating in newsrooms. For example, Reuters partnered with Nokia Research Center to outfit reporters with “mobile journalist toolkits” that allow reporters to file and publish stories from handheld devices. Mobile journalists are ideal producers of locative content because they are already outfitted with the necessary technology, tools and mindset. Not only are they in the field with portable laptops, voice recorders and video cameras, they are also on the hunt for hyper-local content.

7) Audio has been under-appreciated

Now that portable devices are becoming more popular for consuming content, people need to overcome the notion that audio is only for radio. Audio is powerful, immersive and often useful because people tend to use portable devices while multitasking. Several news organizations have started to offer audio tours that can be just as powerful as location-based stories. The New York Times, for example, offers several audio narratives of Manhattan neighborhoods, including tours of the places that defined P.T. Barnum’s New York and the Underground Railroad routes in Brooklyn.

8 ) The success of locative stories depends upon their treatment

Locative stories are more likely to catch on if they’re organic experiences. Consumers will be more likely to embrace this storytelling form if it fits the flow of their daily lives and does not force them into a location and an experience. Breaking news alerts trigged by a user’s current location could be really valuable. For example, users could be alerted of a big demonstration taking place up ahead and decide whether to avoid it or to attend. That said, there is still an audience for immersive, GPS-driven stories like Mediascapes, but the content and delivery mechanisms could differ from that of breaking news locative stories.

9) Readers may be suffering from overloaded maps that look similar

Newspapers widely and frequently use interactive online maps now, leading to what we call “Google Maps fatigue.” More information is being attached to geographic coordinates and readers may be turned off by the basic look of Google Maps, which start to look the same and are ubiquitous.

10) Location-based advertising is the “holy grail” of mobile marketing

Many advertisers want to explore mobile marketing, especially location-based advertisements, but there have been some roadblocks, including privacy and tracking concerns. Also, these ads are sometimes carried by select mobile subscribers, or are only available to owners who opt in and have GPS-enabled phones. CBS and Loopt recently announced plans for localized banner ads on certain CBS mobile sites. More partnerships of this kind are expected, although privacy concerns persist. The company that figures out how to provide location-based ads without infringing on consumers’ privacy or irritating them, while also reaching the specific consumers that they want to target, will be successful.

11) Younger audiences want to be more deeply involved in creating and sharing content, a form of social capital among young adults

We live in an era of user-generated content and participation. Young adults, in particular, are used to sites that allow comments, rating or reviews, and sharing. Sites such as Yelp and YouTube have been distinguished and made popular by these qualities. Social networking sites such as Facebook have applications that allow for easier sharing of news stories and other content.

12) Locative journalism holds great promise

We are accustomed to using linear interfaces, such as alphabetized directories and timelines, to organize and access information. But our experiences in the real, physical and non-digitized world are usually not linear. They’re spatial, dynamic and intuitive. Locative technology has the power to capitalize on that instinct. Also, now is an ideal time to incorporate location-based storytelling into journalism, considering the explosion of location-based services in general society and the technological advancements that are making location-based content viable and increasingly popular.

By Amy Lee

The Associated Press on Monday showed off a program that the news agency says will allow iPhone users to submit news, photos and video to the AP’s Mobile News Network when they witness a breaking news event. The new software, which was unveiled at Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, is expected to be available to iPhone users in the next few weeks, according to Jane Seagrave, the AP’s senior vice president for global product development. The AP says the new iPhone application enables faster downloads and the ability to read news even when the phone is not connected to the Internet, according to an AP news article.

The agency on May 5 launched the Mobile News Network for a variety of smart phones — including the iPhone — that allows users to access local news stories from more than 100 newspapers, as well as national and international news from the AP. The reports are organized by zip code. The agency already allows users to submit photos, news and video to its Web site, and in fact distributed footage this week from amateur videographers who witnessed Sunday’s mass stabbing at a Tokyo shopping area.

Seagrave stated that the news cooperative is “eager to get submissions” of material from iPhone users, and promises that material would be screened by AP staffers before publication. In my mind, this is critical to their initiative, and could help to make it a success.

Any news organization should be especially careful about posting material gleaned by “citizen journalists,” because they must be sure that the submitter (if you will) is in fact, a witness to the event and that they are an unbiased source of news. This will not only help to get news out more quickly with powerful visual images, but it also helps to protect the brand and reputation of the news agency itself. I’ll be curious to check out the application when it is unveiled, and hope that the agency has made the process of submitting breaking news from the iPhone as easy as possible.

By Joyce Chang

A report released this week at a meeting of the World Association of Newspapers said that the digital platforms of newspaper companies are growing at “double-digit rates worldwide, in both usage and revenue production.”

The World Digital Media Trends report, compiled from studies by 71 research partners and covering 232 countries, said worldwide digital and mobile advertising revenues are projected to increase 12-fold from 2002 to 2011, to $150 billion.

An Associated Press article said one study in the report concluded that in some countries, “the Internet will become the primary news and information source within five years, while newspapers will lose the dominating position they have held for more than a century.”

While the report concluded that newspapers can’t depend solely on their print editions to keep them alive, experts cautioned that media companies should not rush unprepared into new mobile and Internet markets at the expense of their traditional print publications, the Associated Press wrote.

In the AP article, World Association of Newspapers President Gavin O’Reilly said about 60 percent of the new revenues goes to two companies, Google and Yahoo.

“The Net is a wonderful place if you know what you are looking for,” he said at a panel debate about digital media’s impact on newspaper revenues. “But we run the risk that running headlong into digital will turn our dollars into pennies.”

 

Newspaper companies must also continue to invest in the medium they know best — printed editions — since there are few accurate overviews of the impact of Internet revenues on newspapers, he said.

Other worldwide results from the report include:
–Wireless subscriptions are expected to grow more than three-fold, from $1.1 billion in 2002 to a projected $3.4 billion in 2011
–The number of homes with broadband is expected to grow more than ten-fold, from more than 51 million households in 2002 to nearly 540 million households in 2011
–The mobile telephone customer base has grown from 945 million in 2001 to 2.6 billion in 2006

Some interesting worldwide statistics from the report and meeting include:
–Online consumption of newspapers has risen by 20 percent in the last year and by 100 percent over the last three years.
–Slightly more than half of readers who view newspaper Web sites spend the same amount of time reading newspapers, while 35 percent say the time they spend with either print or online newspapers has increased.
–Print circulation in China, India and Latin America grew.

Additional information about the research data and the World Digital Media Trends full report is available for purchase or for download by WAN members. Another report, “Trends in Newsrooms 2008,” was also released at the meeting.

By Satta Sarmah

With a bit of anxiety and great anticipation, the LoJo team ventured to Washington Park this morning for a trial run of our Chicago 2016 locative tour.

We were armed with our HP IPAQ GPS-enabled devices, headphones, response surveys–and loads of coffee and bagels— for the people who were kind enough to volunteer as our multimedia guinea pigs.

About 10 people showed up for our experiment, which was the perfect number for our five-person team.

Though we had more GPS devices than people, even the best laid plans sometimes go awry.

A few of our devices went haywire. Some couldn’t locate a GPS signal and others didn’t trigger in the right spots.

Besides the technical errors, there were also human ones. We decided to put markers along the route of our locative tour, but some people got lost or continued walking along the path when they were supposed to stop at a particular point to hear the story.

Some of these mishaps were probably because our directions weren’t as spot-on as we thought.

At the end of the tour, we asked participants to fill out surveys. The feedback was a mix of positive and constructive criticism:

- Because of the glare from the sun, many of the pictures we loaded were difficult for our tour-goers to see. Some even said the pictures were a bit of a distraction and that they would have liked fewer of them, so that they could be more engaged with the physical location.

-Many people enjoyed the historical aspects of the tour. The beginning of the tour included historical photos and information about the World’s Fair held near Washington Park in 1893. We also had Chicago historian and lifelong South Side resident, Timuel Black, talk about what the park was like in the early 1900′s. Hearing and seeing historical information and pictures of Washington Park while touring the modern version of the location really seemed to work.

- Though some said there should have been less narration from LoJo team members, another tour-goer complimented our narration by saying it reminded him of something that would have been written by NPR personality Ira Glass, a compliment that our team will graciously accept.

- Some said more user-control would have been great. However, the nature of GPS-based storytelling is that the content is triggered by the location, which has its pluses and minuses. A good alternative for this would be a podcast, which users could download to their mp3 players.

- Many tour-goers also said locative storytelling could be adopted by news organizations, with a little bit of tweaking of the platform and the storytelling itself. Suggestions included more directions to orient users to the location and an improved interface in regards to the GPS technology.

-As for what stories are best told in this format, people said stories about real estate and gentrification worked best. Downloadable neighborhood tours posted on a newspaper’s Web site are the best way for news organizations to monetize and make use of locative storytelling, tour-goers said.

All in all, we think our locative tour was a success. Though it was, literally, a walk in the park, the LoJo team is a bit exhausted. We’ll be using the rest of our Saturday to engage in an activity that’s a little more lax than a walk in the park— a nap in our beds.

By Ki Mae Heussner

So, tomorrow’s the big day.

After reporting, researching, recording, foraging the Chicago History Museum for antique photographs of Washington Park and building our Mediascapes, we’re ready to test our Olympics audio tour with actual people.

Tomorrow morning, in Washington Park (the site of the proposed Olympic stadium), we’re holding a public event to demonstrate the potential of locative storytelling. All those who attend will take a GPS-guided tour of the park to learn about the possible community impacts of hosting the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.

This past week, we split our time between Washington Park and our computer screens. If we weren’t walking around, iPAQs in hand, trying to catch a GPS signal, we were in front of our laptops, editing audio tracks, optimizing photographs and peering at Google Maps of Chicago’s South Side.

We’re grateful for the brave few who have agreed to serve as our guinea pigs tomorrow (it’s not too late to sign up…) and we think the trial should go smoothly.

Still, given all that we’ve learned during the past few weeks about locative storytelling and our trusty GPS devices, we do have a few concerns:

- The reliability of our handy dandy iPAQs. When they work, they’re fantastic – beyond geographically orienting users, they do have the great potential to uniquely connect users to the history and the people of a given place. But they don’t always work properly. They’re often temperamental. Sometimes they’re painfully slow to load. When we take a whole fleet of them out for testing, for unknown reasons a stubborn few will refuse to cooperate.

- The quality of our audio tracks. After much editing of scripts and audio recordings, I think we have some fine examples of audio-based journalism for our test subjects tomorrow. But the non-broadcast majors among us had to learn a new kind of writing and thinking to master this kind of multimedia journalism. We also added in ambient noise, appropriate music and other (free) sounds to further engage our listeners.

- The precision of our GPS trigger zones. The Hewlett-Packard Mscape maker is very user-friendly and powerful. It’s been a crucial tool for our class, as we learn about the limits and opportunities in locative storytelling. But the maps that the program imports for users are not very granular. Through trial and error, we’ve been able to place our GPS trigger zones so that as people walk around the park they hear the narration relevant to their locations. But, future iterations of Mscape maker (and other similar programs), should make it easier for creators of GPS-guided tours to determine the boundaries of their trigger zones.

By Ki Mae Heussner

It should have been just a walk in the park. But since we were testing our newly-hatched Mediascape, it wasn’t yet the smooth experience we were hoping for.

After building our Chicago 2016 Mediascape (or GPS-triggered multimedia tour), we drove to the sites of a few proposed Olympic venues to test our project.

As with our first test run, we created a bit of spectacle. (If there’s a way to track down a GPS signal while still looking dignified, we haven’t yet mastered it.) But, after some maneuvering, we succeeded in getting our GPS events to trigger at each of our designated locations.

Using a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ, our final project will allow users to travel to Washington Park, Douglas Park and Northerly Island to learn about the Olympic venues planned for each site as well as the impacts of those venues on the surrounding communities. In testing our tour this week, we learned how we need to refine and adjust our tour to maximize the user experience.

A few of the technical issues include:

- Losing the GPS signal. We knew tall buildings could block the signal; now we know tall trees can have the same effect.
- Making sure the photos are optimized for the device. If a file is too large, the device can’t display it. (This problem is easily solved.)
- Keeping the devices fully charged. If the battery power is too low, the device can’t search for a GPS signal. (This is also an easily-solved issue.)
- Correctly defining the limits of the GPS trigger zone. Using Hewlett-Packard’s Mscape maker, we imported maps of Washington Park, Douglas Park and Northerly Island, and then highlighted the parts of the map that corresponded to the places we wanted users to experience the media events. We learned, however, that it’s difficult to trigger events at very specific places (like schools or fountains) that don’t appear explicitly on Mscape maker maps. We were able to get around this hurdle by anchoring media events to nearby intersections or prominent landmarks.

In addition to these technical obstacles, we also encountered a few ease-of-use issues. For example:

- Five-minute audio tracks seem reasonable when you’re sitting inside a warm classroom, but when you’re standing in an open field in 40-degree weather, five minutes feels like 15 minutes. We learned that we need to shrink each media event and/or direct users to more comfortable locations, such as stadium seats. (Chicago weather, unfortunately, we can’t control.)
- Driving tours require substantial and specific driving directions. Washington Park, for example, contains a fairly simple web of roadways. But when other cars are factored in, the park could prove hazardous for a driver trying to listen to a Mediascape. We always assumed that a driving tour would not be a solo experience, but we now know that each audio track needs to provide drivers with very clear navigational cues.

By Joyce Chang

An article this week in Editor & Publisher describes the rise of “mobile journalists,” or “mojos,” who spend most, if not all, of their time outside the newsroom and file remotely from the field. The article suggests that the need for that the traditional brick-and-mortar newsroom may be diminishing as improved technology allows journalists to skip in-person newsroom meetings. Even non-reporting staffers, such as those handling ad placement and design, could potentially work off-site, saving publications the cost of office space.

“As technology offers easier ways to collect sound and images, editors are finding that equipping reporters with the necessary gadgets to work remotely — and kicking them out the door to do it — is an attractive option.”

Along with improved technology, earlier print deadlines and demand for increased online content are driving the push towards mobile journalism. Also, advocates say mobile journalists are able to get hyper-local stories faster, including offbeat stories that might not otherwise be covered.

The article mentions The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., a newspaper that plans to have all 44 news staffers outfitted with mobile journalist kits that include laptops and digital cameras. Reporters on traditional beats still file for print, but their coverage is more immediate and often involves blog-type reporting that is reminiscent of radio-style updating. The News-Press also has “community journalists,” who “cruise certain areas and file stories of interest” for the Web.

But some editors worry that journalists’ absence from the newsroom may lead to a loss of editorial oversight and idea exchange.

Tim Franklin of The Baltimore Sun says:

“Being in an office where you can collaborate with others can be very beneficial…Having a place to meet with someone —there is something to be said for that.”

Another potential obstacle is the price of outfitting reporters with the technology. The article says one newspaper’s kit, which includes a video camera, audio recorder, laptop, cell phone, and other gadgets, costs about $14,800 each.

I think mobile journalists are traditional news organizations’ way to compete with citizen journalists. Also, the focus on hyper-local coverage might be beneficial, particularly for smaller or medium-sized newspapers, because that niche content can’t be found elsewhere.

I find it somewhat ironic that technological advances are making it both harder and easier to get out of the newsroom. High-speed Internet and the wealth of information online have made it easier to report on stories without leaving the newsroom. Digital documents have sometimes eliminated the need for journalists to go digging through old paper files. At the same time, in the case of ‘mojos’, technology is spurring a push for journalists to get out of the newsroom. Ultimately, though, in both cases, technology is giving journalists greater flexibility in how they report a story, what types of stories they’re able to do and how quickly the stories can be done.

By Satta Sarmah

The Lojo Team has been working hard to create a locative experience centered around Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.

We’re attempting to venture into a realm that many media outlets have yet to explore—or so we thought.

As I was surfing the Internet looking for topics to blog about, I came across an interesting feature on the New York Times’ Web site.

In its travel section, the Times has a feature called “Rome at Night.” The feature is accompanied by the usual multimedia suspects–a map and a slideshow.

But what makes the Times’ feature so distinctive is the inclusion of a “Walking Tour of Rome at Night” that users can download to their Ipod.

The tour is narrated by Ian Fisher, chief of the newspaper’s Rome bureau. Fisher also wrote the accompanying article.

Since I’m not in Rome, I obviously can’t experience the tour first hand. Luckily, the NY Times had the foresight to allow the audience to experience the tour online.

The Web site has a map of Rome with more than 10 locations that people can visit on the walking tour. Each location on the online map has two buttons–one for sound and one for audio. People can click on either button to see a photo or hear information about the location.

After seeing the Times’ walking tour, I decided to do a Google search to see if any other publications had done something similar.

It turns out that from 2005-2006, Slate Magazine had a series of audio tours that users could download from its website.

Slate’s first tour was for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Slate called it an unauthorized tour with “commentary museums don’t want you to hear.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour is that Slate’s art critic, Lee Seigel, tells you which paintings are the most overrated and underrated at the museum–a perspective that only a journalism critic could offer.

In previous discussions about locative storytelling, we said it was a great way for newspapers to tell innovative stories that discuss the history of place or report on a once-in-a-lifetime event like the Olympics.

The Times and Slate tours show that this kind of storytelling is great for travel sections as well. However, the challenge will be for news outlets to offer something to travelers that they can’t get from a tour created by a tourism bureau or travel business.

I’m sensing more unauthorized tours are in the works…

By Hope Needles

A recent article in Adweek explores how brands are evolving in a Web 2.0 world, which is challenging the old model of advertising and brand positioning. Customers are playing a more active role in branding, as some companies mostly bypass traditional advertising in favor of customer service and hyper-responsiveness to customer needs, which pays off when customers share their positive experiences with others. Even consumer review sites such as Yelp are following this model, which relies on the strength of communities.

Like marketers and advertisers, large media companies are increasingly opening themselves up to new forms of interactions on the Web and mobile devices. By becoming more receptive to consumers’ interests and behaviors, many of these companies have started relinquishing control of their brands, giving consumers more of a role in the content creation process. We can see an interesting example of this happening between the entertainment industry and cell phone users.

A recent partnership between the film director Spike Lee and Nokia to direct a movie made with cell phone footage shot by everyday people greatly expands the role of the consumer in shaping the product.

Cell phone users will have the opportunity to capture footage around the themes of humanity and birth. There are very few in instructions on the Nokia Productions Web site, which gives anyone who wants to participate plenty of creative freedom.

Spike Lee and Nokia’s partnership will help provide a fuller picture of their consumers’ tastes and preferences for a feature film. By using footage shot by consumers on mobile devices, Spike Lee will be able to create a more personalized experience for moviegoers than a typical studio-produced project.

Will mobile moviemaking revolutionize the film industry? Spike Lee considered this in a recent interview.

“It’s happening already, whether people want to admit it or not. I don’t think film cameras are going to go the way of the dinosaur. There’s going to be a day when people shoot feature films on these mobile devices…Good ones will be in movie theater like everything else,” he said.

Over time, I think that advances in mobile technology will greatly increase the number of opportunities for citizen journalism and participatory media. While there are always risks to consider with user-generated content, I predict that an increase in media collected and viewed on mobile devices will create a whole new set of standards and practices for what is considered engaging content.