Talking journalism and iPhone 5 on ABC Media Report

Yes, Apple released a new iPhone 5 this week. I wrote about it for Crikey. And I spoke about it on ABC Radio National’s Media Report yesterday, in the context of using smartphones for journalism.

Will the new iPhone improve citizen journalism? More broadly, can we use modern Android phones to produce quality journalism?

The tools I mentioned were:

  • CoveritLive for liveblogging.
  • WordPress for blogging more generally, though of course there are others.
  • Any number of tools for posting photos and other images, but I mentioned Flickr and Twitpic.
  • YouTube is the gorilla in the room for posting video, but there’s also services for live video streaming such as Ustream and Livestream. The latter even works as a video switching service in the cloud.

“You’re going to get phone calls after this, Richard, from plenty of people who say ‘No, no, no, use something else. You can get into kind of religious wars about this sort of thing, and it’ll all be out of date by November,” I said. Which is true, but I still might write an article talking about this in more detail some time.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and over at their website you can listen to the entire episode.

Talking Instagram and Facebook on ABC Media Report

The biggest media story last week was the billion-dollar purchase of photo-sharing service Instagram by Facebook — and I ended up talking about it on ABC Radio National’s Media Report on Friday.

If you’d like to explore further than my comments to presenter Richard Aedy, you might like the Wired analysis of the numbers compared with other internet startup buyouts, Paul Wallbank’s refutation of that analysis, and a witty piece in NYMag — as well as my own piece for Crikey.

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and there’s a version at the ABC website.

Talking information security on ABC Radio’s “Life Matters”

I seem to be becoming a go-to person for commentary on hacking and information security stories. On Thursday I did a spot on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters program, covering the basics of just how bad things are getting.

I think I got the balance right between paranoia and reassurance, but what do you think?

There’s a podcast over at the ABC website, along with a few listener comments. But I figured I’d embed the audio here for your convenience, and so it’ll appear in my podcast feed.

I daresay I’ll be doing quite a few of these little pieces over the coming weeks, so if you have any comments I’d love to hear them.

Obviously the audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation.