Tools of The 'Mobile Journalist'

My primary obligation is to fill news-press.com, the Web site for The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla., where the mantra is online first, print second. That means I'm a creature of the Internet now, and doing work that's fundamentally different from what I was doing a year ago, before I became what the paper calls a mobile journalist, or MoJo.

I'm using a new set of tools to produce a different sort of content. It's still journalism, and I carry myself with every bit of the commitment to fairness, ethics and truth I've strived for since I wrote my first story more than seven years ago. Only now there's no filling space or fitting holes or sitting on a story for the Sunday edition.

I never have to worry about shooting a horizontal photo instead of a vertical because of the shape of the space on a page. I don't have to adjust the length of my stories so they hold to one page instead of "jump" to another.

It also means I'm always on deadline. Readers are browsing the site at all times, looking for new content. They want today's news, not yesterday's.

New Thinking, New Tools

These demands require not only new thinking but new tools. In my case, lots of new tools. The passenger seat in my car is covered with a mess of power cords, camera cables, chargers, cigarette-lighter plugs and other strands of electronic spaghetti. Working wirelessly doesn't mean there aren't wires. It takes a lot of stuff to get stories and photos onto my laptop and up to the Web site.

The technology that allows me to file from anywhere is relatively new, and it's not been perfected. I'm a test subject for products that Gannett, the parent company of The News-Press, is considering for purchase as we figure out just what kind of equipment it takes to do this job. Every day I'm faced with some error message

That's the price you pay for getting to try out all sorts of toys that journalists have never played with before.

The linchpin of all this technology is my Sprint wireless card, which relies on the same network as cell phones. It allows me to connect to the Internet from almost anywhere in my coverage area. Sometimes it's a five or 10 minute drive back into range, but since cell phones still work in more places than WiFi does, it's the best linkup I can have.

The connection is somewhere between dial-up and high speed, which means photos take about two or three minutes to upload. My camera takes high-quality images that we can use for print later, and I use Picasa, a quick, simple program, to size them down to smaller, Web-friendly proportions.

The wireless card is an effective tool for the kind of market I'm in, but WiFi might work better in a larger city, and either of them would be virtually useless in the mountains of Kentucky, where I once worked. Every place was like Kentucky in this regard 10 years ago, when I entered J-school.

Times change quickly, and it's not unprecedented for media companies to be forced to react to the sudden onset of a new and potentially threatening medium.

We as journalists must come up with new definitions of what we do and how we do it. That, as much as producing content, is my job.

Chuck Myron is a "mobile journalist" working for The News-Press based in Fort Myers, Fla.

What do you think? Would you want a job like this? Should journalists be allowed to post directly to a newspaper website? Is Chuck right that journalists who don't adopt these techniques are in danger of becoming irrelevant? Weigh in here with your comments!