DEC 9 — If the merits of solo-journalism were my cause last week, I’ll deal with an offshoot this week; the mobile phone camera as a device to record news stories. Now try to remember when you last saw very grainy and shaky video news footage on television. I bet you can’t (but I do remember the hot issue about CCTV footage of a politician in a hotel room with an unidentified woman who was not his wife!)
The reason for that is quite simple. It is extremely rare. The quality of the footage is just not good enough to qualify it for broadcast. But the times are a-changing. Mobile phones have been equipped with video cameras for some time now. But it was only recently that the technology improved. Video shot on a normal consumer mobile phone can now look very good. Looks good, but of course still nowhere close to full broadcast quality.
However, experiments have been conducted. During the US elections last year when Barack Obama won, international news network Al Jazeera gathered journalists from 11 countries around the world to provide reports and interviews from the global public. The countries involved were Mexico, Canada, Austria, Germany, Albania, Congo, South Africa, Egypt, India, Taiwan and Malaysia. Of course, I was the journalist from Malaysia!
We were all given instructions. Firstly, we needed to have a mobile phone that has a video camera and 3G service so we can send the stories over via MMS or the Internet. We were to go around our city (Kuala Lumpur for me) interviewing people and getting their reaction as the results of the election came in. Each of us was given different broadcast time slots, and we had to shoot our stories and send each one in 10 minutes before our time slots. So our reports were practically live with a 10-minute delay.
What I did was to station myself in a university and gathered a few students to watch the election results being announced online. Then I was to interview them and get their reaction to what they had viewed. It was a new experience for me shooting with a mobile phone for television but it was actually quite easy and painless since I only had to handle a pocket-sized phone. I was also concerned about the video quality, but more so for the audio quality since I knew that the built-in microphone would not have the directional capabilities to capture crisp and audible sound. I tried to overcome the problem by shooting in a closed room to minimise noise.
Everything went smoothly. I thank god Malaysia’s inconsistent 3G service was working perfectly that day. The video and audio quality was pretty good too when I saw it on television. The producers at Al Jazeera did not blow up the video to fit the whole screen so it didn’t look pixelised (it displayed it in a window box) and audio was very clear. So 180 million viewers from all around the world got to watch and listen to young Malaysians voicing their opinions on US politics.
Al Jazeera made the right move when it sold the whole mobile phone project as a groundbreaking technological experiment. People have been so used to watching slick news footage that when they see something a bit raw on television, they tend to make negative comments and that takes away from the whole storytelling process and content. But what the network achieved by selling it the way it did was to open people’s minds and this allowed the network to dispel whatever prejudices they had when watching television.
Of course, Al Jazeera isn’t exactly the first or only network to attempt to tell the news by using mobile phone technology. There have been many news programmes that air mobile phone camera footage whenever the need arises, usually when breaking news happens or when going in with a full news crew is impossible. For example, the recent Saffron Revolution in Myanmar by monks received worldwide attention thanks to mobile phone footage and camcorders. On the local front, politicians and lawyers have been in the news, also due to mobile phone technology.
It is obvious that mobile phone video still isn’t up to par with broadcast quality equipment. We still need to wait for the technology to develop further before we can actually depend on them for full-blown news footage activity. But as we wait for that time to come, I’m sure we will still see sporadic usage of the current technology whenever necessary. I’m also sure the wait isn’t going to be that long.
To view the Al Jazeera news videos shot on mobile phone, click here.
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