Ever try to use your laptop in the car? I have. I set mine on the dashboard once to track down unsecured wireless networks in the town I was covering — for a story, of course.
It was a pain in the neck.
What for me was an annoying afternoon is, for Chuck Myron, a normal one. A story in Monday’s Washington Post tells me that Myron is a mobile journalist, or MoJo, at The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. He’s just one of a fleet of journalists thrown into an experiment by parent company Gannett. He and other MoJos cover local news to the extreme, writing brief dispatches about everything — from a minor traffic accident to a cat in a tree — and posting them to zoned sections of the newspaper’s Web site.
The Post story, written by reporter Frank Ahrens, came to me via an e-mail from a friend. Preceding the story was a note from one of her colleagues. “If this is the future of
journalism,” it read, “I better cash in my 401(k).”
There are lots
of reasons to be concerned about the MoJo experiment. Most of
the content created by MoJos wouldn’t meet the standard definition of
news. Much of it appears only online. And, according to the Post story, little MoJo content
is proofed by an editor.
Ahrens tells me he likes the idea of
getting reporters out of the newsroom and into the communities they
cover. In some ways, he says, it’s good, old-fashioned shoe-leather
journalism. But, based on what he saw in Fort Myers, the experiment has a long way to go.
“At times it
seems like there’s a lack of discrimination in the material,” Ahrens
says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a school lunch menu or a city council
meeting.”
No doubt, there are flaws. MoJo journalism does “some things that really stick a thumb in the
eye of journalism orthodoxy,” Ahrens says. But he is quick to point out that this is
an early edition of an innovative project. In essence,
it’s a draft.
One of my colleagues, Poynter Online associate editor Meg Martin, wondered what difference there is between a MoJo and a citizen journalist. The MoJos are, of course, paid by the newspaper. But despite their expensive college degrees, they produce content that, for the most part, requires very little in the way of journalistic training.
What if a news organization were to turn the Gannett formula on its head? Instead of paying professional journalists to produce basic local content, locals could be paid to do it themselves. According to a Gannett news release, that’s part of the plan — MoJos are expected to spend half their time training locals to post dispatches of their own to the newspaper’s Web site.
But to find an example of a full flip of the formula, we need only look to a recent move by Yahoo News and Reuters. According to a story in Monday’s New York Times, the two news organizations have partnered to place user-submitted photographs and videos throughout their Web sites. If Reuters decides to distribute one of the photographs to the subscribers of its news service, the Times reports, the citizen photojournalist will be paid accordingly.
“This is looking out and saying, ‘What if everybody in the world were my stringers?’ ” Reuters media group president Chris Ahearn tells the Times.
Despite the flaws inherent in experimentation, one thing is certain: It is not going away. As circulation and ad revenues continue to fall, news organizations will continue to seek ways to pull them back up — and to find entirely new ways to make money.
Most editors agree that enhancing local coverage is key.
Ahrens, the Post reporter, knows that. On his washingtonpost.com blog Monday, Ahrens wrote that his newspaper recently underwent an attitude adjustment, shifting its unspoken slogan from “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” to “If it’s important to you, then it’s important to us.”
At The News-Press, that means deploying a team of MoJos armed with laptops, cameras and recorders. At the Post, Ahrens says, it means hiring newspaper Web site designer Rob Curley, known nationwide for his groundbreaking work in creating an intensely local and interactive Web site for the Naples (Fla.) Daily News and the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World. And, across the board, it might simply mean that regular reporters start to act a little like MoJos.
Look, for example, at the image of Myron, the Fort Myers MoJo, that ran alonside the story about him. It wasn’t made by a photojournalist. Ahrens did it himself.
