An article in Journalism.co.uk highlighted Reuters new Mobile Journalism project.

Working in partnership with Nokia, reporters in the field have been equipped with lightweight kit – based around a videophone – to file and publish stories without the need of any additional technical or editorial support.

There is some interesting stuff on their site already. But, of course, I was interested in the kit.

I was especially keen to find out how they had connected  an external mic to the phone and it turns out that it’s been done with a special adaptor developed by Nokia.  I want one!

Of course the cunning bit of technology at play here is really the application that sits on the phone. According to journalism.co.uk:

Reuters has also developed a mobile editorial interface that links the toolkit to the in-house editorial process, allowing stories to be published almost instantly from the field.

Metadata facilities in the mobile automatically combine all the information the device has about the context for the story – location, time, date.

My last post about newsroom video kit haas kicked up quite a bit of comment about production time and kit.  Stuff like this makes me think that investment in developing for equipment may be just as valuable as investing in the kit itself.