A journalist friend was complaining the other day how she was employed as a journalist when she first started her work. Her job was reporting the news. Then one day she was asked to be a journalist and Facebook updater. Then she became all that AND the Twitter person for her newsroom. After that she was asked to not just write stories, but take photos and do audio and video as well…
As tech innovations fly into newsrooms across the world, few organisations take time to think and plan about who will be assigned what tasks or about the training needed to make journalists proficient in using various digital media tools.
Enter Storymaker, a journalism app that has recently released version 2. I love this app! It takes one through some very simple steps of filing a video, audio or photo story, giving useful prompts of what exactly to capture at various points. It then compiles the video, audio or photo story for easy publishing to your favorite platform.
There are a number of templates to work from and you can download lessons and guides to help make you not just a better user of the app, but more aware of the elements of good journalism in general.
Right now, the app is only available for Android, but a chat with a representative of the Guardian Project, who have taken over development of Storymaker, revealed that the iOS version is on its way.
This is such a cool product! I can’t wait to see it make its way to iOS.
I’m curious though, why they don’t have a desktop version. In my experience many (most?) journalists work almost exclusively on desktop. Have you used the Android version? How do you feel about the mobile-first approach? Do you think it will still see widespread adoption for establishment types?
This app was designed primarily with citizen journalists in mind and the idea is to capture the action and file the story where and when it happens – hence the mobile approach. The app also leverages tools that mobile phones have, i.e. camera and microphone – with the idea that you capture the footage and process it immediately – so it would not be as effective on desktop devices.