A mobile phone with high quality video, instant live uploads onto the internet, and complete freedom in where and when you can shoot and broadcast. It sounds too good to be true. I know my mobile phone can’t do that.

Lucky my mobile phone can’t do that actually. I’d still be trying to pay last February’s phone bill.

Although Australia’s lack of any unlimited monthly data plans on mobile services makes the mobile journalism revolution more expensive than in other countries, the joys of mobile journalism, (or MoJo), cannot be denied.

For the journalist looking for more efficient news gathering techniques, the development of small multimedia phones, or smart phones, are prompting change in journalistic storytelling.

MoJo Robert Scoble says the phone ‘put a TV studio in my pocket’. Initial stories completed with the phones are less than perfect, but the development of phone adapted tripods and better lighting will make the benefits of an unobtrusive camera and intimate interviewing style more clear.

Reuters plans to give citizen journalists smart phones, giving the news agency extended news gathering scope, without the expense of funding more news bureaus.

This leads me to wonder if MoJo’s may start to cover parts of the globe that were previously neglected by the news radar (such as the south pacific islands). At least it seems certain that MoJo’s will be able to access stories that were out of reach not so long ago.