Occupy Wall Street broadcaster Tim Pool’s protest coverage, shot entirely on smartphones, has received more attention than most mainstream media. The reporter — who doesn’t identify with the term citizen journalist — is now devising ways mobile technology can provide unprecedented news coverage.
Pool rose to fame after his 21-hour live Ustream broadcast of the Nov. 15 raid on Zuccotti Park went viral on Twitter. His stream provided what large camera crews could not — an unfiltered take on the action as it unfolded. His footage was featured on Al Jazeera English, MSNBC and Time.com.
Live broadcasts, Pool points out, are advantageous in situations of media crackdowns, because police reportedly confiscated several computers, wiped memory cards and destroyed equipment. Since the protests began Sep. 17, almost 40 members of the mainstream media have been arrested.
But Pool isn’t stopping with his heavily trafficked live broadcast. In the works are new ways of covering protests around the world, such as his “Occucopter,” which will be capable of shooting and live-streaming aerial footage of protests. Airspace can sometimes be closed during police raids, preventing media helicopters from capturing the action or estimating crowd size — not that Pool has access to a helicopter. The Occucopters will fly below 400 feet in the air, where FAA airspace begins, and therefore cannot be banned. (Check out the video above to learn more about them.)
In addition to providing aerial footage, Pool’s working on an Occumentary, aggregating the best clips from the dozen Occupy protests he’s attended across the country. He also has plans of creating a Ustream superchannel, which will map out different live broadcasts of protests occurring simultaneously.
Pool spoke with Mashable about how he’s innovating with technology to provide incomparable angles of the Occupy movement.
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