In the 1960s when the Doors lead singer Jim Morrison wailed out “Mr Mojo Risin,” people wondered what these mysterious words meant until somebody figured out that he had created an anagram for his own name in one of his songs.
In the decades since, “Mojo” has meant a number of different things, including in some circles Motor Journalism as applied to writing about Ford and Chevy’s new model year offerings. I tend to think of that as Automotive Journalism, though, and as the kind of thing you’d see in Road & Track, for example.
More recently, Mojo as Mobile Journalism has come to apply to a new form of journalism enabled and empowered by new and often more portable technologies. These include everything from laptops with WiFi connections to cell phones to GPS receivers to internet applications such as Google Earth that allow you to bring up satellite photos of practically any square inch of the earth’s entire surface.
Of course, journalists have been using cars for almost as long as there have been cars. But the introduction of these new, portable technologies hold the promise of empowering journalists in ways that were previously so expensive that only those employed by corporate media behemoths could afford to do it.
In the second part of this entry, we’ll take a look at how some people are already beginning to apply some of these technologies, and raise the question of what kind of new possibilities are beginning to appear on Journalism’s near horizons.
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