Even a digital-first journalist such as myself has a few reservations, such as if the money used for the accompanying iPhone rig could have been better spent elsewhere. The allure of the iPhone is its portable, do-it-all nature … but hand a reporter the OWLE and a cheap tripod and suddenly the iPhone doesn’t feel like the freedom inspiring tool it is, and more like a ball-and-chain dragging slowing them down from the work they feel they should be doing.

In general though, I am all for our staff having smartphones. Reporters (hopefully) can begin to treat their Twitter account like their notepad, adding observations on the scene and returning to their stream when writing their stories (one of our reporters, Beth Miller, is already adept at this, and I hope that she can spread her knowledge to some of the more skeptical members of our newsroom). As a photographer/videographer, I can use the phone as a hotspot to send both video and photos back to the office wirelessly (currently I think we have two working wifi cards to spread among both reporters and photographers). And, as the main emphasis for this push seems to be a focus on breaking news, everyone can shoot video and upload it directly to our Brightcove account via a related app.

I have no idea just how this experiment will end … On it’s face, it seems like a no-brainer … replacing pen and paper with something smaller that can also act as a camera, video camera, audio recorder, radio scanner, etc. But perhaps it will end up as Gannett’s previous video initiative did, with only a few properties actively using smartphones. Follow-up to come in a few months…

I am hoping to add game summaries for each game, audio interviews from the coach and key players on important games, videos as the Register produces them, and possibly a Vuvox express presentation that is linked to a rss feed of user submitted Drake basketball photos.

Any thoughts? Things I should add? Take out? It is pretty narrow within the confines of my blog template, but I chose to embed this here so that when I show my editors the presentation, it is clear that it can be embedded and integrated into our paper’s template easily.

The WiredJournalists.com mission statement reads:

WiredJournalists.com was created with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind. Our goal is to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st Century role.

So sign up, join a group, collaborate and become a better journalist.

The site is described as “A place to discover photographers, photographs and news about photography.”

Seems like a great way for photographers to share inspiring work.

Breanna was nice enough to let me ask her a few questions and share her thoughts on the whole situation.

How did the Rural News Network choose the Apsaalooke nation for a community news project?

Last year (the first year of the class) the RNN went to Dutton (duttoncc.org). It’s the hometown of Courtney Lowery, one of the class professors. The whole RNN concept was her idea.This year, one of the students–Mary Hudetz–suggested we go to Crow. It’s her hometown and she saw the community’s need for the service. We also have three Crows in the class who are familiar with it.

What was the response like from the local citizens when the project was announced?

Those I talked to thought it would be a good idea. Not everyone in Crow uses the Internet, but some that do said they’d visit the site and would be interested in posting. It was hard to describe the project until we launched the website.

How will CrowNews.net remain sustainable as a news source? Training future generations? Maintaining interest?

This is the challenge. As the RNN, we act as teachers, training the citizens to, eventually control the content by themselves. The next semesters of the class will continue to work with Crow as they have with Dutton. We’ve set up contacts who we hope will be faithful contributors to the site. I think the interest will be there. It’s the first place of its kind for the community to share their events and thoughts.

How does CrowNews.net fit into the overall landscape of the local media scene in the area?

It’s completely different from any other media in the community. The local media scene is the newspapers of outlying towns and the new tribal newspaper. CrowNews.Net provides the community with a place to discus local issues and post stories and news. It gives the community a voice.

In particular, is CrowNews.net in direct competition with Big Horn County News, and, if so, is that a bad thing?

I don’t believe we’re in direct competition with Big Horn County News. I don’t believe we’re in direct competition with anyone. We’re a separate entity, providing a very different service.

What role do you think community journalism sites will play in the future of journalism in small rural areas such as the Apsaalooke nation? In small urban areas such as St. Cloud? In large metropolitan areas such as LA or NY?

I can see community journalism playing a key role in rural, urban and metropolitan areas. I think it’s especially important in places like the Apsaalooke nation who have limited resources for social networking. I think there’s a large desire in our society for community journalism, despite the size of the city. People want to be heard. People want to talk about the news.

What sort of training is involved when working with the community? Do ethical guidelines play a role in this training?

We hope to train community members how to post, in addition to upload photos or even videos. We want to be able to show them how to do anything they want with the site. As journalists, of course ethics play a role. However, we must understand ethics are more forgiving in the case of community journalism. These are opinions and views.

Of course, Ryan Sholin has been praising the alternate uses of Twitter for some time now, including but not limited to his tumblelog based approach to covering the Wharf to Wharf race in Santa Cruz.

Another example is seen in Twitter’s potential to cover spot news, as seen when David Armano witnessed a teen save an elderly woman from being hit by an oncoming train. Armano posted updates of the events to his Twitter account immediately after it happened, long before either the Chicago Tribune or CNN posted their stories.

Prior to signing up, I already knew that you could text message or IM in both text and audio messages. After signing up I learned that you can also receive “tweets” and notifications to your IM or phone based on keywords you want to track. You can also follow specific twitter accounts, receiving updates on your phone or IM client whenever they post a new tweet. For example, I am following the LA Times fire coverage at http://twitter.com/latimesfires and if I want to follow Greater Alarm fires I can subscribe to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Twitter account. Other Twitter accounts I ran across include NPR, various sections of the NY Times have their own Twitter accounts, CNN, BBC, etc.

A fairly comprehensive list of news services that use twitter can be found on the Twitter pbwiki. Also, the Big Juicy Twitter Guide is a good place to learn more about Twitter features and the various things you can do with a Twitter account.

To keep with the theme of multimedia, we thought it a good idea to create a web presence for the weekend, with the ability to feed in flickr photos tagged “sjsushortcourse,” provide information to those coming in to San Jose for the weekend, and allow participants a space to share their thoughts on the weekend and multimedia.

Making the site also allowed me to try video blogging for the first time (something I am hoping other people will also try out this weekend). I ended up using a service called viddler, instead of iMovie or Quicktime Pro because iMovie was not recognizing the built-in iSight and we do not have QT Pro. It also saved me the hassle of having to export the video and then upload to a service such as Youtube or blip.tv, as I recorded directly into the viddler interface.

You can view both the flying short course site and my video attempt at sjsushortcourse.wordpress.com.