Mobile phones are reshaping the landscape of broadcasting.
The gadgets are transforming the sector into an on-demand, interactive, and global experience.
There are sophisticated mobile phones with high resolution cameras, high-speed internet, and streaming capabilities.
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The smartphones enable anyone to capture, edit, and broadcast live content directly to audiences worldwide.
This bypasses traditional media gatekeepers.
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Social media platforms and apps amplify this effect.
Below is Kenyan journalist Bernard Mwinzi’s experience from the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan as shared on Facebook:
“There is no doubt that the mobile phone changed the way news is consumed, but little attention has been given to the way it is influencing how that news is generated, produced and shared.
At the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan, the mobile phone is, by a good mile, the most important gadget in what is currently the largest newsroom of the world.
Here, everywhere you look, the mobile phone is in high-level press conferences shooting LIVE TV video and audio, it is taking HiRes images for newspapers and websites in the corridors, and it is even being used to edit television bulletins on the go, as teams scurry from one corner of this vast complex to the other.
Of all the news crews attending this COP from Kenya, none, and I mean NONE, came with what we used to call “professional TV cameras”, and none even carried a simple DSLR for stills.
All, from NTV to Citizen to KBC and every station in between, have been filing stories using their mobile phones.
They have gone LIVE from here using nothing but the rear HD cameras of their phones, simple and cheap lights, tiny Bluetooth microphones, and WiFi.
No satellite links, no audio cables, and no that helter-skelter flamboyance of film crews.
It this is happening on every major international news channel as; on Al Jazeera, CNN, Sky News, Euronews, CGTN, the BBC, Baku TV, SABC… the whole lot.
What does this mean for operators in newsrooms, including those in studios, where smart cameras have already been deployed?
It means jobs are on the line.
And it means people have to re-invent themselves and learn new tricks.
The old is gone; the future is here. Now.
At a media briefing early morning yesterday, there were only two cameras pointed at the big figure talking, they were both swallowed by the forest of mobile phones on assignment.
I was with Zeynab Wandati of NTV at COP26 in Glasgow a few years ago when she told me that the mobile phone would take over television production.
I thought she was joking. Today, as she prepared her 1pm bulletin from here, she beamed to me: “Toldja!”
