Last week in Goma, IWPR held a mobile phone reporting training in partnership with the Voices of Africa Media Foundation for 10 of our Congolese female reporters. I think saying that I was excited about this training is an understatement, but I was also a bit worried the journalists would have difficulties picking up the technical skills to shoot and edit their own videos directly on the mobile phone. These were not baseless worries since teaching them radio editing using the software Adobe Audition has proved really difficult in the past. Only two weeks before the mobile phone training, I was working with our 15 new radio reporters and being characteristically impatient, I was quietly losing my mind trying to explain them how to clean the sounds they had just recorded. Adobe Audition is not particularly difficult to get, but I think the key factor here is that Adobe Audition works on a computer whereas the video training was done on mobile phones. This has already been argued by many before, but it was a concrete proof to me that journalists in developing countries like the DRC will possibly jump from tape recording to mobile phone journalism, skipping computers in the process because they are too expansive, burdensome and a technology people here are not used to. I grew up with a computer at home whereas young journalists here are growing up using mobile phones. They grasped without difficulties what seemed to me a complicated process to edit the video clips they had shot on their new Nokia E52 (genius little machine if you ask me). It also makes more sense in a country where network coverage is more reliable than the electricity supply. However, the lack of mobile version of news websites limits the accessibility of content that would be produced by mobile reporters to a handful of people who can afford to access videos and texts through… computers. Anyway, we all had a good time. Henri Aalders and Jacob Mugini, the two Voices of Africa trainers were very pleased with the outcome of the weeklong training and said the group was among the best they have trained. I’m looking forward to the first videos.

If you want to see what a report-like video shot on a mobile phone can look like and hear more about the training, watch this.