Abstract
ABSTRACT Mobile journalism is a fast-growing area of journalistic innovation that requires new skills and work practices. Thus, a major challenge for journalists is learning not only how to keep up with new gadgets but how to advance and develop a mojo mindset to pursue their interests and solidify future work options. This paper investigates a globally pioneering network of mojo journalism, the Mojo Community, that consists of journalists and practitioners dedicated to creating multimedia content using mobile technologies. The study is based on empirical data from interviews with and the observation of the participants of the community over a two-year period. The analysis draws on Wenger’s concept of “communities of practice” to explore the domain, structure, and role of this communal formation for innovation and change in journalistic practices. The community’s core group is comprised of journalists mainly affiliated with legacy broadcast organizations and with a particular interest in and extensive knowledge of mobile technologies. The participants perceive their engagement with the community as a way of meeting the challenges of organizational reluctance to change, fast-evolving technological advancements, and uncertain job prospects.
Highlights
Mobile journalism is considered to be one of the fastest growing areas of journalism (Hill and Bradshaw 2019; Perreault and Stanfield 2018) and is characterized by the close entanglement between journalism and technology. Westlund and Quinn (2018) describe mobile journalism as a journalistic process, and Burum (2016) refers to it as a “holistic form of multimedia storytelling” (153) whereby a professional journalist writes, shoots, edits, and publishes news stories entirely on a mobile, networked, handheld, multimedia device
This paper investigates a globally pioneering network of mojo journalism, the Mojo Community, that consists of journalists and practitioners dedicated to creating multimedia content using mobile technologies
Drawing on Wenger’s ([1998]; 2002) theoretical concept of “community of practice” (CoP), this study investigates the role of this particular community as an overlooked collective actor in the field of mobile journalism
Summary
There is still little knowledge about how and where professional journalists develop new professional practices or adapt to new technologies This study addresses this issue by focusing on a group of professional broadcast journalists who explore the disruptive potential of mobile technology in journalism by engaging in and learning through a network of peers. They are the forerunners and early adopters (Rogers and Shoemaker 1971), or journalistic pioneers (Hepp and Loosen 2019), of mobile journalism, organizing themselves in a global community dedicated to pursuing knowledge on how to apply mobile technologies for journalistic purposes and mobile content creation. The paper is divided into four main section, we start by briefly explaining the background and the theoretical framework of the study, describe the empirical data and method, and discuss the results
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