Journalism goes Mobile in a World of Developing Multimedia

Until the mobile reporting assignment in Multimedia Journalism, I’d never used my smartphone to develop a news story before. In fact, I’d never heard of the storytelling applications such as Pixotale or Storehouse until we utilized these in class. I found them very effective in reporting my stories and look forward to learning more about these applications and how to better report with them.

When I published my first story on Pixotale, reporting on the "Sew and So" art exhibit at Virginia Tech, I had difficult uploading my video to the story. All though there’s an option on Pixotale to upload a video from Vimeo or YouTube, my video from Vimeo refused to load to the page. After 30 minutes of struggling with the application, I decided to take a loss and simply post the URL of my video into a textbox. Despite this setback, I didn’t have trouble uploading any of my photos or te

xt to Pixotale. I found the application easy to navigate.

Overall, I’ve found my experiences with mobile journalism, all though brief, to be very successful while posting short reporting pieces. Effective journalism is all about publishing a good, reliable story as soon as possible in order to satisfy the needs of the readers. Mobile journalism aids in the timeliness of publication.

I see mobile journalism emerging in storytelling in the future as more people utilize these storytelling applications. Newspaper agencies could benefit from this form of mobile journalism by creating stories and posting them to social media outlets in order to reach a large mass of readers. I personally feel as though these mobile storytelling applications are better suited to short stories. Perhaps as mobile journalism develops, more applications will support lengthier stories.

Screenshot: Pixotale.com