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I’ve got to take the hat off to Nick Petrie over at Redbrick (the paper of Birmingham University) for doing something I wasn’t aware could easily be done: creating an iPhone app for his paper.

The app is powered by a service called MotherApp, which takes content from RSS and Twitter feeds and plugs it directly into a pre-established template. Simple, yet effective. The app splits advertising revenue 50/50 between MotherApp and the content provider, or it can be taken ad-free for an annual subscription of $99.

Now, it’s not exactly perfect. There’s only an option for a single RSS feed, so far as I can see, so there’s no way of splitting content into news/sport/features etc. But for a starting point, it seems like a great and cheap (even free) way to dip into the mobile sphere. Now, there’s obviously the problem that it requires a consistently up-to-date web service, which, sadly, is a challenge for many student papers (my own included). But, if you are running a tight online ship that’s keeping your visitors coming back for more between publication dates of your print issues, it might e something to consider.

And, of course, it’s easy to point out that this functionality could be made available via a mobile web browser.But that’s not the point- Petrie is giving his audience options, and maybe many of them will appreciate having a dedicated app for the purpose. And, short of having a programmer to hand or employing one (who knows Cocoa, Objective-C etc.), simple yet effective services like this are the only real way for the student press to do this kind of thing.

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There’s an excellent piece published on The Guardian today, titled “Waking up to press slaughter”. In it, Jim Boumelha, President of the International Federation of Journalists, argues that the press need to take more responsibility for publicising the plight of their own kind, and mount pressure on the international community to combat the targeted assassination of journalists. There’s an interesting point to be made here. From the above-linked article:

For many years the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has been publishing on the first of January the list of journalists killed in the past year, but it’s rare for commentators to show the slightest interest. Last year was one of the deadliest years on record, with the IFJ listing 137 journalists and media workers killed across the world. Only a few newspapers, among them the Guardian, bothered to report it. Imagine if these were killed politicians or killed policemen. In almost every corner of the globe, journalists continue to be targeted, brutalised and killed. Some say they may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But journalists have a duty to be on the spot when news is in the making.

On a day when most media headlines and blogs will be devoted to the decision by Google to stop censoring its search results in China, I thought I’d encourage you to read the piece and think about the genuine dangers of a career in serious investigative journalism.

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