4-2-15
How are your reporters covering news today? For nearly two decades, Neal Augenstein has been an award-winning reporter with WTOP-FM and wtop.com. He's believed to be one of the first major-market radio reporters to do all his field reporting on an iPhone. The Newseum recently displayed one of Augenstein's phones as "an artifact of the new era of mobile-empowered reporting," according to the tech site Mediashift, where Augenstein reflected on his five years as an iPhone reporter.
Augenstein says technology has evolved, along with journalists' job descriptions. And WTOP's focus changed from being the top-rated radio station to being a multi-platform digital news organization. And he goes on to say how emerging platforms and social media have changed the fast-paced game of news even more.
Augenstein says that, in 2015, photo and video-sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are where news is broken, "generally in visually-oriented, easily-digested tidbits." He says Facebook has altered its mobile app to provide similar features to Instagram (now owned by Facebook), which boasted over 300 million active users in 2014. "Visual storytelling apps such as Steller, Storehouse, and JamSnap provide an alternative to traditional news packages and can be used in conjunction with those legacy packages, to remain engaged throughout the day with listeners, viewers, and users."
Augenstein argues that despite warnings that professional journalists are becoming extinct, trusted and trained journalists are more valuable than ever. "With so much 'noise' online, and as business models continue to change, I believe there will always be a need for accurate, ethical, and creative storytelling."
Read the entire article at Mediashift HERE and check out Neal's website called http://iphonereporting.com/
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