I’ve been reading quite a bit recently about "mojo" or mobile journalism.

Jeff Jarvis gave his two cents last week in the Guardian, my mate Rob Andrews over at Paid Content got an inside look at Reuters’ ongoing collaboration with Nokia and the N95 and now I read that the BBC is involved in its own N95 mojo project as well.

Which makes me feel that I shouldn’t sit on our own "mojo" project any longer. In a few weeks I’ll be able to show you the full fruits of what Custom Communication has been up but here’s a sneak peek…..

Since last September we’ve been working with Nokia Trends Lab and Cardiff University School of Journalism (JOMEC) – where I teach a module in online and mobile journalism – to develop what I think is the first academic course in mobile journalism.

Nokia kindly gave me a number of N95 handsets to play with and I’ve been working with 90 postgraduate members of JOMEC’s journalism diploma course to see how we can best use mobile technology to augment online news and feature writing.

The main assignment that I set the students was to write an 800 word online feature story (we used the theme Capturing Cardiff to produce a range of stories) and then use the N95s to take digital photos, shoot short pieces of video and record audio "backstories" all of which would add value to, and create a more rounded form of online journalism.

As a side project, Nokia Trends Lab also ran a competition for the students to create a short piece of mobile storytelling. Here is the winning entry:

But back to the serious journalism!

It’s been an interesting experiment to say the least. I’d be lying if I said all these young, tech-savvy journalists embraced my idea….some thought what they dubbed "robo-hack" was a valueless gimmick. A few others felt experimenting with mobile phones was hardly justification for the money they’d spent getting a professional journalism education (each to their own I guess).

The majority however took to this crazy media experiment with gusto and gave it a go. Over the course of last semester they created some dynamic digital storytelling with the help of the N95s and as a result we came to learn a lot about the potential and limits of this "mojo".

For one thing, I now know you need a decent directional microphone if you want to capture clear audio in outdoor environments using the phone (but any broadcast journo could have told me that). I also now realise that video should be short and tell its own narrative – like a sidebar to the main story – for it to add value. Likewise, audio interviews work well when they are extensions of a shorter quote in the online story.

Nokia Trends Lab and I are currently working to showcase the students’ work on the Trends Lab website and I’ll let you know when we have it ready to show. In the meantime though, check out the MoJo laboratory/social network I established for the JOMEC students.

The experiment isn’t over. Soon Bernhard will start "mojoing" with his students in Rome thanks to another collaboration with Trends Lab. Hopefully we’ll also be able to help Nokia recruit other media schools into the collaboration.

We also see this form of online story telling having valuable corporate communication uses – a perfect way of telling company CSR narratives and other corporate stories in an accessible form that, um, people will actually enjoy reading and learning about, perhaps?

Stay tuned as Custom Communication’s own mojo practice takes shape……

- Matthew