HYDERABAD: Mobile phones and drone cameras from Yusuf Omar, co-founder of “Hashtag our stories,” a social enterprise which aims to train communities and students on the fringes of the society whose voices are not heard by the mainstream media to tell stories using their phones. Here is Yusuf Omar speaking to about MoJo. He was addressing students of Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, recently.
Many Indians are not aware about this concept of Mobile Journalism. How would you explain Mobile Journalism (MoJo) to them?
Mobile Journalism or MoJo is creating content for mobiles on mobile! But I’m not married to this idea that MoJo means you must shoot with a phone always. For me, a DSLR is Mojo, so is a drone and a go pro camera. It is basically the idea that one man or one woman can do stories as a solo individual rather than having a whole team including a camera person, the technicians, the reporters and all of them working on a single story. MoJo is less about the device and more about the concept of carrying an entire newsroom in your pocket.
What got you into this field of MoJo?
I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I wanted to cover wars, natural calamities and disasters and parachute into hard to reach places. This was at a time when newsrooms were cutting back on budgets in a big way, they were taking less foreign correspondents and I realised that by using mobile phones to cover stories, I can effectively become the cheapest person in the newsroom.
Like, they could send me to any place and I can put a drone in the sky and do 360-degree video or a Facebook live and a whole bunch of stuff. In this way, I was able to be a resourceful journalist. It also meant that I was able to move fast. Another advantage of MoJo is that I could get intimate with the subject as he/she would often forget that my phone is even there!
When did this whole idea of Mobile Journalism come up for you?
It was happening all over the place. Especially around 2008, newsrooms around the world were closing down due to recession and that is when people started turning to MoJo. For me, the idea of MoJo hit in 2010. I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t have a camera or a camera crew and sometimes out of deprivation, you find inspiration and I realised that I must be efficient with whatever I had. It’s all about being innovative with what you have.
With the onset of mobile journalism, everyone is a reporter these days. Do you think that journalists are under the threat of losing their jobs?
Right now, journalists need to work out what their role is. I think everyone can be a reporter today. With the number of devices that is available today, anybody can be a witness today. In this amount of noise, where the process of storytelling has been democratised, we need journalists and editors to help us work out to make sense of the noise and to verify and fact check the stories that are shared by the reporters. So now, the role of journalists must change from the creator to the curator.
What are some of the challenges that you faced as a MoJo?
Well, the benefits of MoJo definitely outweigh the challenges! But sometimes when I interview a president or a CEO, they will be disappointed when you arrive and you don’t have that big crew behind you and all you have is a mobile phone!
How do you go about educating people about MoJo?
I don’t even have to educate people! Since 9/11 , it hasn’t been big broadcast cameras but people with devices that has been bringing us the biggest stories of our time. Time and time again, we are seeing that it is the citizen generated content that is deciding the news agenda like the “black lives matter” movement. This trend is only going to continue.
In India, you don’t get network coverage in many parts. Wouldn’t that be a problem for live stories?
I don’t understand why everything has to be “live” all the time. All stories need not be a breaking news story that requires a live engagement. The point of going out there is to record the story and we can publish it later. Data is a challenge in India. We have to ask ourselves whether it has to be live and more often than not, it need not be live.