Follow Friday: Mobile-First Journalist Eleanor Mannion
After years working at RTÉ, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Eleanor Mannion became the network’s first mobile journalist specialist.
In 2016, RTÉ commissioned and aired Mannion’s documentary “The Collectors,” following six people with obsessive collections from toys to comic books to memorabilia. It became the first documentary broadcast in Europe to be shot with a mobile phone.
The hour-long program was shot entirely on an iPhone 6s+ in 4K.
Mannion began training her with Glen Mulcahy and now works as part of the mobile-first digital and social team headed by Philip Bromwell. She writes shoots and edits stories and reports for web, social media, as well as repurposing material for television and radio.
The team focuses on small stories with big impact, essentially human interest and issue-driven topics intended to appeal to a younger audience.
As a one-person mojo, she looks for upbeat, positive stories, like this one about teaching dance classes to students around the world during the pandemic.
Prioritizing distribution for the web and social media platforms, she and her team continue to experiment and innovate, working with a variety of aspect ratios. While she shoots all original footage in 16:9 format, she and the team regularly recut in a vertical format too.
Here is a vertical version of a story about lockdown diaries, which is also available in a more typical web package.
To learn more, follow Eleanor Mannion on the following platforms.
Twitter – @eleanormmannion
Instagram – @eleanor_mannion
MoJo, short for mobile journalism, is redefining the news industry across the globe as journalists increasingly leverage the power, creativity, and technology available with the smartphone to produce and publish media storytelling for distribution across a range of platforms.
This series will highlight reporters leading the field of mobile journalists.
