Mobile Journalist Toolkit: a field study on producing news articles with a mobile device

Today's handheld mobile devices with advanced multimedia capabilities and wireless broadband connectivity have emerged as potential new tools for journalists to produce news articles. It is envisioned that they could enable faster, more authentic, and more efficient news production, and many large news producing organizations, including Reuters and BBC, have recently been experimenting with them. In this paper, we present a field study on using mobile devices to produce news articles. During the study, a group of 19 M.A.-level journalism students used the Mobile Journalist Toolkit, a lightweight set of tools for mobile journalist work built around the Nokia N82 camera phone, to produce an online news blog. Our results indicate that while the mobile device cannot completely replace the traditional tools, for some types of journalist tasks they provide major benefits over the traditional tools, and are thus a useful addition to the journalist's toolbox.