Mojos leading journalism’s evolution

By Matthew K. Ing

Catherine Toth isn’t your average journalist.

Her typical day working for The Honolulu Advertiser doesn’t take her anywhere near the Advertiser’s Kapiolani Street office. Outfitted with a MacBook Pro and an air card that allows her to connect to the Internet and the Advertiser network from anywhere in the state, she works from home, from coffee shops, from beaches and from her car.

Honolulu Advertiser reporter Catherine Toth tries to explain the intricacies of the evolving journalism industry. Toth is a mojo – or mobile journalist – and part of a changing breed of multimedia newspaper reporters.

She reports from the streets, shooting video for the Advertiser Web site and talking to real people in real situations. When she’s not filling holes in the paper, she’s filling slots on supplemental Advertiser Web sites, like MyAdvertiser.com and HawaiiMoms.com. Not to mention Toth’s firecracker attitude, which has made her hodgepodge blog, The Daily Dish, one of the most popular features on the Advertiser Web site.

Toth is a mojo – a mobile journalist – and part of a new generation of journalists changing the way that American newsrooms operate.

“The purpose is to put more reporters out in the community to extend our coverage,” said Toth, who covers Waikiki and East Honolulu as her mojo beat. “Having been born and raised in Hawaii, I’m a big believer in local news and felt this was a great opportunity to report about the community in which I lived and played.”

That was the message that Toth delivered Sept. 8 to about 110 Hawaii high school students at the Ka Leo High School Journalism Workshop at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Campus Center. Toth, who also regularly teaches journalism courses at Hawaii Pacific University, told high schoolers about the changing landscape of journalism, in which shrinking newsrooms demand much more from individual reporters.

The Advertiser is no exception. Earlier this month, four long-time Advertiser reporters left the paper on the same day following corporate buyouts for their early retirement. The newsroom shrinkage follows a trend seen throughout the Gannett Co. Inc.’s chain of 85 daily newspapers, which includes The Honolulu Advertiser.

Kamehameha High School sophomore Ariel Navares was one of the students who attended Toth’s workshop. Her high school newspaper, Ka Moi, does not currently have a fully-functional Web site, and her journalism teacher, Lionel Barona, said that his department has only recently started discussing the possibility of adding multimedia and online reporting into Ariels’s curriculum.

“It seems really exciting, but at the same time, really scary,” Ariel said. “What Cat said about learning video, online, photo, super-fast breaking news seemed cool, but it was a lot to take in. I need to be able to have all these new skills just to get hired.”

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Byron Acohido tells a group of high school students about his job reporting on technology for USA Today. Acohido said that his paper hasn't started demanding multimedia of individual reporters, although he is preparing for the eventual change.

For Toth, becoming a mojo was a little scary, too. She admitted that the added responsibilities are starting to take away from the reason she got into journalism in the first place – writing. However, she said that one of the hardest parts of being a mojo and setting up a home office is not being able to “go home” at the end of the day.

“Many of us (mojos) wind up working longer hours than if we were in an office because the computer is always on, it’s always there and it’s hard to switch work off,” she said.

Byron Acohido, the high school workshop’s keynote speaker, said that he likes working from his Seattle home as a technology reporter for USA Today, Gannett’s flagship publication based in McLean, Virginia.

In 1997, Acohido won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting for his coverage of a malfunction in Boeing passenger planes around the world. Unlike Toth, who often roams the streets in search of a story, Acohido said that he rarely even leaves his home. He does most of his interviewing and beat maintenance via e-mail.

“Personally, I haven’t done any kinds of multimedia reporting at USA Today,” Acohido said as he struggled to get his Power Point back on screen. “Gannett, our parent company, is looking at how all of these new features pan out at the smaller papers before we start multimedia at USA Today. The Advertiser is actually one of the biggest Gannett papers in terms of online content. We’re watching them closely.”

In the meantime, the Advertiser continues to lead the papers under the Gannett umbrella in breaking news posts and online content. With all of these new multimedia features raising the Advertiser’s marketability in an ever-evolving media industry, are Advertiser mojos getting paid for the extra things they do?

In the words of Toth, “The short answer: no.”