Is “Mobile Journalism” made for TV?
Between slow, hesitant steps forward, and promises of a bright future, Mojo — or Mobile Journalism — is considered today as a new audiovisual practice.
Already some journalists and reporters, gathered in community, consider the Mojo as an unavoidable discipline to modern journalism.
At a time when the mass media, like TV, are slowly changing and social media are being installed in the information world, Mojo is about to develop more widely. Challenge or Reality?
Mojo — Protean audiovisual system
As a News Editor at ENEX, I have been observing the Mojo phenomenon for several months now.
In 2017, I participated in major conferences on the subject in Paris (Les rencontres Francophones de la Vidéo Mobile) in February and then in Galway, Ireland, for the Mojocon, the biggest conference on Mobile Journalism, founded by Glen Mulcahy.
I also questioned many colleagues and counterparts of the TV channels and partners with whom I work every day. Notably BFM Paris which uses only iPhones to make their own TV coverage of the Parisian news.
And meetings with application designers dedicated solely to the Mojo practice (i.e: City Producer) underline a strong trend. Their application fills an expectation from some Mojo users who can, with a smartphone, shoot, edit and embed their videos with all the details required to make a news clip ready to broadcast.
Mobile Journalism is also thriving thanks to many trainers, such as Guillaume Kuster and Philippe Couve, who travel the world to provide their valuable advice to whose want to design videos only with a smartphone, with applications carefully used.
Many companies also design and manufacture plenty of accessories as the easiest way to transform smartphones into a reporting tool.
In this context, I gave two keynote speeches on Mobile Journalism in February and June 2017, respectively, in Brussels and Luxembourg, at conferences organized by ENEX.
Over the past few months, I have been able to measure the developments, practices, and the enormous expectations of a highly motivated community that has developed with Mobile Journalism.
While the mass media industry in general, and TV and news business in particular, are looking for their future in the face of all the technological upheavals initiated by smartphones, social media, GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple,…), the challenge is to avoid prophetic discourse on the topic.
This approach is not the easiest as Mobile Journalism is located at the confluence of many fields such as TV, News, Internet (slow innovations) and social networks, high tech and IT/ICT (rapid innovations). This can be illustrated by the following scheme:
This meeting point (telecoms, IT and media) fully characterizes Mojo. This also makes it less predictive and thus more difficult to accept in an industry like broadcast television and by some professionals.
As Guillaume Kuster explains in an article entitled “Les Smartphones ne seront probablement jamais des caméras professionnelles (mais on s’en fout)” (Smartphones will probably never be professional cameras (but we do not care)), it may seem futile to replace the techniques and practices that already exist in TV Broadcast by the Mojo ones. In other words, the use of a mass consumer device platform to produce professional content can create some skepticism specially since this approach related to Mojo is still often assimilated to “amateurs” world.
From Amateur Video to Mojo: Self-filming
For my part, these observations brought me back in the 90s when I was, during my studies in Human and Social Sciences in Metz, one of the first to look at a phenomenon which was not present yet. I am referring here to self-filming1 (or acte autofilmique in French).
At that time, to elaborate my first observations and analysis on self-filming, I began to study some family movies and amateur videos. Some of these films, during the 80s and 90s, were often identified as art or experimental movies once viewed in the public domain2, depending on the reception context.
Since then, with technological advances and camera integration in front of mobile phones (the iPhone4 by Apple was the first iPhone to include a front facing camera in 2010 to use Facetime)3, the practice of taking selfies not only developed rapidly but entered into the most common uses of the smartphone.
That being said, I emphasize the difference between the notion of selfie and self-filming. Quickly explained, this is essentially due to the fact that the self-filming act (video) tells a story, unlike a selfie (photo + social media)4.
The codes and techniques used to identify amateur videos and family movies (shaky pictures, under or overexposed images, blurring, inadvertent zooming, awkward framing, etc.)5 are now perfectly accepted by the public, but also widely used in the media and television news.
Most TV reports now use amateur videos6 made with a smartphone (Storyful is the leading supplier in this field these days).
This has even become systematic when it comes to illustrate a topic on a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or a major accident. More precisely, adding a video showing the first moments of a breaking news or, a person who testifies by filming himself with a smartphone is not uncommon and even seems to offer a high value of authenticity in news coverage.
Then, for example, a multitude of self-filmings has appeared on social networks during the war in Syria, allowing to reinforce and spray testimonials on the spot. The web-documentary entitled Syria: Intimate Diaries of Revolution by Caroline Donati on Arte (TV + web) is an excellent example of the use of self-filming and Mojo.
From Mojo to TV: the PTC (Piece to camera)
From its start as an amateur practice, self-filming can be applied today for more professional purposes thanks to the Mojo. A journalist / reporter can now use his/her smartphone to film him/herself live. On TV, it becomes a live stand up, a technique widely used during a TV news coverage to testify and make comment about an event.
Indeed, for decades, the Piece to camera has been one of the main characteristics of TV journalism (although this technique has been prohibited for a long time in fiction movies (with very few exceptions). Reporters in a live stand up situation, have always addressed themselves directly to the viewers thanks to the Piece to camera.
So, is it absolutely necessary to move a SNG or a fly-away for making a live stand up? Then book a satellite channel? Set up a video camera on a tripod by a professional cameraman, etc….? with inherent costs while it is still possible now with a smartphone.
Then, the reporter can make a self-filming and can use the app and services of provider like Live U, Dejero, Bambuser (to name but a few). And let’s be honest, even Skype or Facetime can do the trick sometimes, with the ultimate condition that the (not crowded) place of the live is covered by 4G network or WiFi (if not, the first option with SNG remains necessary).
And by 2020, the arrival of the 5G may undoubtedly further accelerate this trend.
Here the use of a smartphone for a purely and traditionally television broadcast takes its meaning. Some will say that the image quality will not be optimal or at least not at the level of a pro camera.
But today, does the viewer really matter, while most of the videos that he sees on a smartphone posted on social networks respond to a grammar and codes that come from amateur video and family movies.
And, today, even editors-in-chief have become much more lax about the qualities and formats of the footage they broadcast in their news shows.
Mojo for TV: Better is the enemy of good
A traditional TV channel is a heavy, conservative machine that does not change its habits easily.
In television, editors and producers face a dilemma concerning Mobile Journalism. If the use of a smartphone in reporting and live conditions can be attractive, mainly to reduce some production costs, this may have an impact on the workflow and on skilled human resources on tasks that have been well defined for a while. On this basis, TV channels are reluctant to make significant changes to replace what is already working properly. In this case, the best is the enemy of the good. And the use of the Mojo will be used at the margin.
Mobile Journalism is probably ideal for small structures such as local channels (Leman Bleu (Suisse), MaTélé (Belgium), FITV (Falkland), BFM Paris …, with a flexible workflow and a less vertical hierarchy.
BFM Paris uses iPhones for news coverages and live stand up. But, as reported by Alexis Delahousse, BFM Paris head of news, and Guillaume Nicolas-Brion, BFM Paris journalist, the iPhones sometimes has its limits. For example, the batteries can empty too quickly during a cold weather, or filming at night can create difficulties due to underexposure.
The other part of the dilemma is that broadcast TV will use the Mojo’s resources to offer very different video and storytelling formats online, on the TV channel’s website or on social networks (Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Periscope, etc….). These are often better suited to young audiences. But the question is how to make money with it.
For the moment, this practice, beyond the function of informing or entertaining, remains a marketing tool to remind to the Millennials (Generation Y), or the younger generation (Generation Z) that TV channels can reach them (on their smartphones) without them having to statically sit in front of a conventional TV set,…like their parents or grand-parents.
RTBF, the French speaking Belgian public broadcaster, has got this point by recently launching a fictional series available only on Snapchat, called #PLS, which is becoming very popular.
And more news oriented, German channels ARD and ZDF have developed a program for youth on Snapchat called Hochkant (Vertical in German). These projects, among many others, have in common as being designed with a smartphone to be viewed on smartphones.
So, does Mobile Journalism need to prevail over broadcast television? Beyond the usual patterns, the Mojo undoubtedly finds its “raison d’être” in online publications and on social networks, now widely used by all media combined. This practice may include historical TV techniques such as live or piece to camera.
To reach a different audience and to preserve its assets, Mobile Journalism must create its own language (self-filming, …), its own formats (horizontal and / or vertical), its own media territories (television, cinema, documentary, amateur video, experimental film, etc.), in order to approach its effects and not to mimic the frames, formats and context of reception (on that, see the work of Yusuf Omar).
And the smartphone plays a crucial role here, because for the first time in history, the device that produces content (video, images, texts, voices, writings, emojis, drawings,…) is also the one on which the audience views these same contents. And this trend will increase in the years to come.
The smartphone can be considered here as an ultimate multimedia tool. To go even further in its function of shooting pictures or movies, editing, sharing, sending, transmitting and watching, facilitated by the practice of Mojo, we propose here to name the purpose of the smartphone as being omnimedia.
More pragmatically, the approach of Guillaume Kuster (in his article), and others, is probably the most reasonable to emphasize the fact that the smartphone must remain what it is in the practice of the Mojo: a tool to tell stories differently, on alternative platforms and formats, compared to what is still, for the moment, on broadcast television.
Here might be the future of Mobile Journalism, in the unceasing and inevitable fusion of all the mass media by a growing online presence, in parallel to their respective traditional medium, with consequently a significant impact on the workflow in the newsrooms and habits of viewers widely modified and more targeted.
Article in French here.
1Jarosz Térence, l’acte auto-filmique dans Le journal intime vidéo : concept, forme et reconnaissance, Université de Metz, Mémoire de DEA, 1999.
2Allard Laurence, « Une rencontre entre film de famille et film expérimental», in R. Odin (idr), Le film de famille usage privé usage public, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1995.
3Apple was not the first manufacturer to include a front face camera on a smartphone. One of the first mobile phone with front face camera was the Samsung SCH-X590 in 2002.
4Jarosz Térence, « Opportunities and challenges of Mojo », Conférence ENEX Coordinators meeting, Bruxelles, 16 février 2017.
5Odin Roger, « Le film de famille dans l’institution familiale », in R. Odin (idr), Le film de famille usage privé usage public, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1995.
6Jarosz Térence, Le film de famille et l’effet « télévision », Université de Metz, Mémoire de Maîtrise, 1998.
