'Messing About On The River' Earns Holiday

Two students who undertook a mobile reporting assignment have been rewarded with a trip to Cape Town.

Postgraduate journalism students Andy Sloan and Chris Cousens used mobile phones to make a short film of a reporter surfing down the River Taff in Cardiff as their entry for a contest organised by Nokia.

The competition was launched by the Finnish telecoms group in partnership with Cardiff University to show how mobile phone cameras can capture film of sufficient quality for use on news websites.

Online journalism lecturer Matthew Yeomans told holdthefrontpage.co.uk: “The idea was to create a piece of mobile journalism that would tell a story of film, design or music in Cardiff.”

Sloan said of their winning film: “We got a different perspective on Cardiff thanks to the size of the phones and by taking a bit of a risk with them.”

The contest formed part of Nokia’s Trend Labs and the two students participated in the initiative’s first experiment in Africa while on their expenses-paid trip.

You can view the winning film featuring an intrepid reporter in search of ‘Cardiff Reef’ on YouTube.