cellphone journalistic tools

Journalists are put to danger and may be inhibited/stopped from covering the news in emerging democracies and other troubled areas. Yet the need of independent news media is ever as high. Delivering unfiltered, uncontrolled and as free news as possible is a crucial part of any work towards and/or to sustain democracy. Making people trust the news media and to enable them to feel part of the news making is equally important. Therefore a big part of this project is to strengthen the citizen journalistic part of news media in those regions and empower people to tell their story. Imagine people being able to report back from events such as the London bombings, the riots in Paris and the recent events in Belarus or maybe just report from your neighbourhood about any crims or other problems.

To enable this an information relay technology/process has been developed that allows users ‘in-the-field’ to submit information and multimedia content via a single SMS, MMS or email to multiple end information sources. The method facilitates the reporting of text, audio, pictures, and video updates directly to several Internet websites via any cellular phone. The technology has been focused participatory journalism such that the reporting and dissemination of news and information can occur to blogs and other contributory media websites as well as established news websites. It has been successively tested in a numerous countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Israel, India, Sweden.

The solution has been successfully prototype-tested in a number of cases:

You can try it yourself at http://inthefieldonline.net/showcase and you will be able to cellphone blog to most different CMS-systems at http://ajgar.com, at which the technique is further tested.

Below you find some live demos for some blog platforms. Grab your cellphone and try it.

Live demos for both Wordpress and Drupal can be shown on request.