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journalism posts

Filed under: Cool tools, Cult of Mac, Odds and ends, iPhone

iPhone video on the air

A Miami television station aired a story completely shot on an iPhone, as they covered the launch of the iPhone 3GS. The video looks pretty good, and once it was shot it was uploaded to Final Cut Pro for editing. Although you can trim the beginning and end of clips on the iPhone itself, you really can't edit.

The story aired on WFOR's 5PM News. The reporter, Gio Benitez, also used the iPhone Voice Memo app to record his narration, so the piece really was a true iPhone production.

Here's a link to the WFOR web page and that contains a link to the video as it aired on the news. If you want to go directly to the video it is here.

Of course there is nothing new about video on a cell phone. It's been around for quite a few years, but with a faster processor giving the user a nominal 30 frames per second, decent video is now a reality.

Don't confuse the video from the iPhone with what a good consumer camera can do, and my Flip minoHD cam looks a bit better, but for capturing something on the fly, it's a nice thing to have.

One other note. If you upload the video to MobileMe or YouTube the phone will compress the video before you upload and it won't look nearly as nice when you get it right off the phone before that compression step.

Thanks to John in Indianpolis for the tip.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, iPhone, App Store

Citizen journalists: CBS EyeMobile

CBS EyeMobileSo, you're walking down the street and you see a bank robbery in progress, or you're driving your car down a road in rural Illinois and see a biplane crash into a loaded gasoline tanker truck. Now you can be a CBS "eye on the street" roving reporter with EyeMobile for iPhone.

CBS wants you to take photos of events as they're happening, then use EyeMobile to upload your pics and report on what's happening. If the iPhone ever gets video capabilities, you'd most likely be able to use EyeMobile to upload your news videos as well. (Note to Apple: that video capture capability would have been nice in the 2.1 update.) CBS is now accepting video from other sources, like your camcorder or BlackBerry.

EyeMobile also lets you watch what other "citizen journalists" are posting. While the quality of reporting might be somewhat iffy, anything has to be better than the talking heads that the networks hire.

EyeMobile is available for free in the App Store (click opens iTunes). Get it today and start your career as the next Walter Cronkite.



Filed under: Audio

New tips for audio journalism from Apple

As a holiday weekend treat for the ink-stained wretches among us, Apple added a new article Friday to the ongoing series for journalists making the leap to multimedia newsgathering, Audio in Rich Media, up on the Pro site. Focused on the right gadget choices for audio recording on the go, Joe Gore's Audio Gear for Rich Media tip story suggests picking up a digital recorder and a reasonable-quality dynamic microphone before adding sound to your bag of tricks. He also lists four favorite recorders for $500 or less. Hey, Father's Day is coming up...

Filed under: Internet

AOL refreshes Netscape as social news site with a twist

AOL yesterday relaunched the aging Netscape.com as a social news site (yea, like digg) but with a professional journalistic twist. Check it out. Anyone can sign up, submit and vote on interesting stories from across the web in a wide range of categories from politics, money, television, technology, health and even 'do no evil'. Going above and beyond the social news bookmarking concept, however, is a staff of journalists, including TUAW's own C.K. Sample III and Fabienne Serriere, who will follow up on some of the stories and dig deeper by nabbing interviews, posting related links and keeping users informed as the situation develops (on a side note, we finally figured out why C.K. and Fabs gave us that 'we'd tell you what we're working on, but then we'd have to kill you' bit a while ago).

Why are we telling you about all this since it isn't specifically Apple-related, you ask? Well, we should probably tell you the project was headed up by Weblogs Inc.'s CEO, Jason Calacanis. Granted, Weblogs Inc., including TUAW, are owned by AOL, but we could still call it crummy if we wanted to - fortunately, that isn't the case. We think it's a great concept that you should go have some fun with. Still, if you're looking for some Apple-specific details before you fire off a flaming comment, how does 'full-Safari compatibility' work for you? In fact, I think the site actually looks surprisingly better in Safari than Firefox.

Tip of the Day

Use Spotlight as a reference tool. Type any word in the Spotlight box and one of the top entries will be a definition. Click on it, and it will bring up the dictionary application to check the word in either the dictionary, thesaurus, Apple database, or Wikipedia.


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