WATERLOO, ONTARIO, CANADA and TEMPE, ARIZ. — The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University has adopted Dejero’s mobile newsgathering technology as a core component of its curriculum for broadcast journalism students. The Cronkite School has deployed Dejero Live+ transmitters for use by students to provide live, remote coverage of breaking news and feature stories for the on-campus public television station, Eight, Arizona PBS (KAET). In addition, more than 30 students have installed the Dejero Live+ Mobile App for the iPhone in order to go live with broadcast-quality video whenever and wherever they encounter breaking news, including Cronkite News bureaus in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The school obtained the Live+ transmitters through a grant secured last year from ASU Women & Philanthropy, enabling the school to launch “Access Across Arizona”—an immersive professional program in which students produce multimedia news stories that are widely used by professional media outlets across Arizona. With the Live+ transmitters, the students are able to travel to rural and remote regions of the state and file live or recorded news reports from communities that are typically underreported or overlooked by commercial media.
In addition to “Access Across Arizona,” students use the Live+ transmitters to produce mobile reports for “Cronkite News,” the school’s newscast that reaches 1.9 million households on Eight. Students have used the Live+ mobile transmitters and the Live+ Mobile Apps to produce live reports on stories ranging from the U.S. primary and general elections to Arizona immigration issues. In one example, a student working for a semester out of the Eight bureau in Washington, D.C., used an iPhone with the Live+ Mobile App for a live shot in front of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Administration building, reporting on VA Hospital issues.
