by AllisonBlood
Jennifer Pagliaro is a Senior at Carlton University in Ottowa, Canada. This past fall she and some other seniors compiled the Website Strikesituation.com to document and report on the possibility of three different faculty strikes on campus. She and a team of four other journalists were able to report using primarily BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter and WordPress to gather and report information on the strikes. Over a period of three weeks the team was able to tweet and post pictures of rallies and pickets. Pagliaro says the most helpful technology was definitely Twitter, because as pickets caused traffic jams on and near campus, students were able to tweet road conditions from where they were and thus the team was able to map out on the websites the best route for getting around.
As for communication amongs the journalists, Pagliaro says BBM was the most helpful because it is not only instant but easily shared in a group. About a year ago, BBM came out for iPhones as well, an app called PingChat. Something like that would be great for groups of journalists reporting on the same topic, especially in a chaotic situation.
Pagliaro says if any riots would have become violent, a video editing software for BlackBerry would have been helpful. Apps like iMovie or Qik would be interesting to try out on the iPhone or Andriod to see how they compare to traditional video editing. Pagliaro says part of the reason they did not use video on their site was because it was too time consuming, but maybe would have if it was easier and would have served a greater purpose in their project. A difficulty Pagliaro experienced was having to have one person stationed at a computer to update the site. BlackBerry didn’t have any apps that would allow the team to modify their site straight from their phones. The ability to update the site from the field would have been better than just tweeting to their followers. Paglario says after their three weeks of reporting, their twitter following was at 200, and they had over 1,000 “likes” on their Facebook page. Facebook mobile was a decent tool for getting messages out, she says, but it was not as good as being able to post directly to the website. Another downside was that not everyone in the community had a BlackBerry, so BBM could only be utilized between the reporters and not with the community. Also at that time some apps for photo and video sharing were only available for iPhones and not for BlackBerry, so a uniform platform would have made things easier.
Pagliaro says she was surprised at the overwhelming positive response she got from the community. She says through Twitter she was able to get a lot of feedback on the site and community input that made reporting easier. She says sometimes she would get Tweets from school administration or unions before there would be a press release, so this was a more instant way for her to report. For the small amount of technology she was able to employ through the BlackBerry software, she was able to make a lot happen.
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