Chat Apps as Cost-Effective and Efficient Reporting Tools

Our interviewees reported that chat apps’ versatility in using Wi-Fi is an attractive feature for reporting in the field. In places where SMS texting costs money, chat apps offer a cheaper alternative. In addition, they let users circumvent the limits of their data plans and other constraints. For example, instead of having a constantly streaming voice conversation, WeChat allows users to send short audio messages.

When Wi-Fi is not available, most chat apps rely on cellular data connections; but some offer alternative types of connectivity that can prove useful when cellular networks are overloaded, disabled, or otherwise unavailable. During the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, FireChat briefly gained popularity as a mesh-networking tool that could not be disabled by a hostile government action. This is because FireChat works not only on cellular and Wi-Fi connections, but also through a Bluetooth mesh connection. During an early, critical phase in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, when Hong Kong’s streets were filled with protestors and concerns spread about cellular networks overloading or being shut down, nearly five hundred thousand people downloaded the app. Journalists onsite told us that FireChat’s main virtue was that it could be used when there was no possibility of accessing the internet.41

However, FireChat’s open-access, many-to-many model quickly made the app ineffective as a vector of organizational information, as its digital spaces filled with rumor and unverified information. A European digital editor told us: “FireChat was something that we were monitoring, and everybody downloaded it during the [Umbrella] Revolution. It wasn’t really a platform for the sharing of content, though.”42 Like many others, the editor was drawn to FireChat because of concerns that cellular networks might fail, but found WhatsApp to be a more reliable source of information: “On the first day there was this concern that [the government] would shut down the cellphone network at Admiralty, where the first protest was. So we looked into FireChat, but we ended up not really using it because WhatsApp worked perfectly fine.” The open chatroom nature of FireChat meant it was neither a site for important discussions about the protest, nor a useful tool for newsgathering or sourcing. While FireChat found enthusiasts as a tech story and reporting tool,43,44,45,46,47 the app played only a brief and minor role in the protests from the perspective of the resident foreign correspondents we interviewed.

In the context of political protests, when large numbers of people are gathered together, chat apps offer journalists ways of quickly finding and connecting with sources, and sourcing multimedia content. Some chat apps even offer a location-based tool for finding contacts, which enables journalists to source news from specific locations relatively quickly. Reporters noted that their access to richer contextual information through chat apps was helpful in targeting specific people and places. WeChat has a GPS-based friend-finder for meeting people nearby so journalists on the platform can contact nearby persons at a breaking news event to interview as sources. A social media-savvy reporter highlighted the advantage of speed and multimedia that WeChat offered in protest situations:

It takes two seconds to just go, “Hey can I get your WeChat [contact details],” and you scan the QR code. You have that information, you can communicate with them. You’re not going to get portraits of them, you’re not going to get them on camera talking for video footage but you can definitely get information from them and you can conduct a [livestream] video [footage] from that [chat app].48

Similar to Nimbuzz, a cross-platform instant messaging app, WeChat has a multimedia advantage because of its ability to connect to Facebook (except within mainland China). In summary, the low cost of connectivity, access to location data, and multimedia functionalities have all played important roles in journalists’ uses of chat apps to cover political unrest.

results matching ""

    No results matching ""