They call themselves mojos.
Armed with MP3 recorders and wireless laptops, mojos or mobile journalists report the issues and conversations we may never see on the evening news or in the metro section of our daily newspapers.
Mojos are the newspaper industry's latest attempt to patch a hole in what seems to be a sinking ship of declining reader interest. Mojos and the integration of audio, text and image online is a way of connecting mainstream newspapers to communities in new ways.
A mobile journalist is the reporter of the future -- someone trained across platforms, print, audio, video and web, to feed content to an increasingly growing network of community micro-websites and blogs. For mainstream mojos the micro-sites are developed, connected and maintained by traditional news outlet, such as the daily newspaper.
The newspaper industry is recognizing the economic fallout from decreased readership, increased costs and a growing interest in community blogs and micro-sites.
More importantly, the industry seems eager to corner an internet market of community-based readers. Many newspaper executives may say that mojos are an effective way of providing communities with information, breaking news, archives and searchable databases not available in treaditional print media.
Not only do mojos report on issues typically crowded out of a daily news hole by the so-called "big" stories, they also help to train community members to tell stories about their neighborhoods and file directly to micro-sites.
According to Kate Marymount, Executive Editor of The News-Press in Fort Meyers, Fla., "mojos "contribute a much deeper look into a neighborhood. Their job is to share things that people are talking about over the back fence."
OK, fine. But I may have missed something here. Haven't newspapers always been about providing local content?
Trends in newspaper publishing during the past 20 years have pushed traditional media to lose touch with the needs of communities and neighborhoods. Although a lot of great local reporting has been done, there has also been a tendency toward the "big" story of the day, softer and longer feature pieces with less offensive content, and far less space to dispaly it all.
Newspapers have two sides to them -- serving the information and entertainment needs of the public and making money. Independent ownership of most newspapers across the country have been gobbled up by larger chains of newspapers owned by larger and larger corporations. Over time, communities have become disenchanted with journalism not because it is a business, but because, let's face it, it has failed to recognize and respond to its readership. Mojos, then, may be seen as an industry response to the economics of doing journalism in the 21st century -- one which seeks to appeal to both mass and niche markets.