“Everyone should have a smartphone in the future; it’s baseline gear,” says Damon Kiesow, senior product manager at Boston.com. Speaking at the Excellence in Journalism convention in New Orleans, Kiesow said newsrooms have to get more “intentional and strategic” when it comes to mobile.
“It doesn’t work to just go buy 20 iPhones and tell the reporters to figure it out,” says Kiesow. “You need to know what you want to accomplish and provide training.”
Kiesow also says that journalists’ smartphones should have these features:
- Both still & video cameras
- An active developer community that keeps coming up with new apps
- GPS capabilities
- Wifi (4G much faster and better for sending video/photo — though iPhone 5 probably won’t have it)
He went on to talk about about dozens of apps and digital tools that he finds useful, including:
- Audioboo — lets you record and share audio online with an embed code for your own site
- AudioNote — allows you to sync your note taking and your audio recording, so you can search for the clip by clicking on a word in your notes
- Zamzar — use to download clips from YouTube and other sites, then convert and save to many different file types
Here is Kiesow’s full list of what he says mobile journalists should know about. “I call it Walmart journalism,” says Kiesow. “The gear is cheap enough that you can practically outfit a newsroom at Walmart.”
