Mobile Work Efficiency: Balancing Between Benefits, Costs and Sacrifices

Smartphones can be characterized as multipurpose mobile devices, or as pocket-sized mobile computers and multimedia devices. In the fieldwork of mobile journalists in news reporting, the efficiency of work could potentially be enhanced with smartphones. Smartphones equipped with mobile services and applications support various work tasks from preparing for the reporting to capturing and submitting or publishing the story or news material directly from the field. Based on ten studies on mobile news making the author discusses smartphones as enablers and characteristics that may constrain the usage and decrease the perceived work efficiency. The identified benefits of smartphones for mobile journalists are categorized as 1) temporal, 2) location, 3) convenience, 4) satisfaction, 5) informational, 6) communicational, 7) work process, and 8) monetary benefits. The costs and sacrifices are related to the ergonomics of working and lower level of working comfort, a lower perceived quality of the created news material and reporting, a feeling of loss of control over the capturing, and changes in the roles and responsibilities, for example. Balance between benefits, costs, and sacrifices of using smartphones in mobile news making seems to depend on the situation at hand as well as on the goals and objectives of news reporting.