WHAT IS MOJO?

A personal perspective

I’m what you’d call an old line journalist. I cut my teeth in the newspaper business on manual typewriters, real copy paper that you actually cut with scissors (or a ruler edge) and pasted from a paste pot. I helped edit pages made up of movable type from linotype machines. Printer’s ink has been in my blood a long time.

But I’m feeling a need for a transfusion, big time, because the journalism world I grew up in is long gone.

Today I’m still in the writing business as a consultant. While the fundamentals of journalism and story-telling have stayed the same – who, what, when, where, why and how — everything else has changed.

The whole way facts are gathered, assembled and disseminated has changed, because new tools are available. At the same time, the habits and preferences of the reader, the end user of the writing, have radically changed.

Notwithstanding the shrinking numbers of people still clinging to the paper New York Times, a few other newspapers and a handful of long-form magazines, very few people want to read anything longer than a short bite – maybe even no more than 142 characters.

They also want pictures. And charts. And diagrams. And schematics.

And especially video.

What’s more, everyone is a journalist or a journalist wannabe. We all are carrying around video cameras on the smart phones in our pockets that make us all video shooters. Now we can also be distributors of information.  We can disseminate our “news” with a few clicks – no need to roll the presses, the delivery trucks or the bikes on the newspaper route.

Now that we are all videographers, we all need re-education.

How do you use this amazing equipment that we all have? What are the best techniques? What accessories are needed for quality work? Let’s start with the basics: just what is mobile journalism?

According to Western Reserve Public Media, Ohio’s largest PBS station, “Multimedia journalism is the process of combining text, images, sound, videos and graphics to tell an interesting story. Multimedia journalists often work for newspapers, radio or television stations or use computers in social media areas. They sample animations, data, video, graphics and audio in multimedia.”

Here’s where MoJo Shooter comes in. MObile JOurnalism Shooter will be your guide to becoming adept at taking and sharing videos on your smart phone (and for you serious aficionados who want to become Ansel Adamses of hand-held video, on your digital SLR). We’ll be featuring podcasts, blogs, articles and links to mobile journalism sources to help you along. So bookmark the site and check in often