Mobile Media Toolkit: Making Media Mobile

The Mobile Media Toolkit, published by MobileActive, is a resource to help professional and citizen journalists, news outlets, and media development organisations find, evaluate, and deploy tools for reporting and sharing content on and to mobile devices.

The web-based toolkit contains a set of five primary sections, supplemented by additional features and resources that offer users articles and examples specific to certain elements of mobile media production.

The Create section contains tools and techniques that will enable reporters and citizen journalists to create content on their mobile phones. Individual articles focus on taking photographs, recording video, recording audio content, creating location-based reports, and using smartphones to create content. The focus is on the preparation, techniques, and tools needed to create the content itself

Share covers the topic of sharing mobile content (content created on mobile phones) on the web, including using microblogs, blogs, and various online sites that host multimedia content.

Deliver provides information on delivering news (and news-like content) to audiences who are using mobile phones. This can involve directly sending content to users' mobile phones or making content accessible on mobile phones. Mediums ranging from short messages to websites and mobile apps, and content ranging from text to audio to photos and videos, are discussed. Examples focus on organisations making news content accessible to mobile audiences; tools and techniques are primarily meant for content publishers that are publishing traditional and new media.

Engage covers the topic of engaging with audiences on their mobile phones. The section focuses on helping media organisations see their mobile-using audiences as participants in the media process, and not just passive consumers of content.

The Secure section includes:

1. The Mobile Security Primer, designed to help a person identify and understand the risks involved with his or her specific mobile use - as a trained reporter, photojournalist, citizen journalist, blogger, or anyone who witnesses and documents a news event on a mobile phone.
2. Protecting Yourself, which offers use cases and tips to better protect people who use a mobile phone as a reporting tool.
3. The Security Apps and Reviews section, which highlights security apps.

Additional sections of the main website include case studies, interviews, blog postings, links to additional ActiveMobile tools and resources, and how-to articles, such as "Mobile Audio Recording in the Field" and "Engaging Constituents With Mobile Polls".  A how-to-use tools section provides guidance on how to tailor the toolkit resources in the context of various audiences - from professional and citizen journalists to news and media organisations to non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The Mobile Tool Reviews section contains a list of third-party tools that can be useful to citizen reporters and newsrooms. The items listed are linked to data sheets that offer detailed information on the key features and functionalities of each.

For users interested in additional participation, the site provides a newsletter signup, which delivers new case studies, how-to guides, and tool reviews as they become available.