I had the requisite snazzy shirt and tie, but I showed up at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, without my laptop computer and without my camera. I had decided to go all mobile.

I'm one of those reporters who usually overdoes it with technology. I have more cameras than I can keep track of and practically live with my MacBook. Plus, I have two other computers at home.

I was covering the Mobile World Congress for the Reynolds Journalism Institute and several other media organizations. It's the premier exhibition of mobile phone technology and attracts more than 60,000 participants, along with over 500 journalists.

The (very light) toolbox

On Monday, I, like most of my reportorial kin, showed up lugging my laptop plus my Lumix ultra-zoom digital camera. At least I had left my multi-lens Canon DSLR at home after deciding it was just too heavy and bulky to carry around all day.

Tuesday, I thought, this is a mobile conference, right?  So why not cover it with mobile hardware?

I lightened the burden on my shoulder considerably by putting only my iPad 2 and a Logitech keyboard into my conference satchel. For photography, my iPhone 4S was waiting in my pocket.

The verdict at the end of the day? Very impressive, though not perfect.

The Logitech keyboard was a godsend. It's a little aluminum unit that snaps onto the iPad like the lid of a laptop, then pops out to provide a very usable keyboard. One feature on the keyboard alone makes it worth shucking out the $90 -- it has arrow keys that let you move the iPad cursor around. Anyone who's tried to write more than a few lines on an iPad knows how frustrating it is to go back a few spaces to correct a mistyped word.

The keyboard added just an inch of height to my iPad and kept the total weight under 2 pounds. My bag had plenty of room left over to stash pens, toys and other convention gimmes.

The iPad and the Office HD app let me quickly type and file stories, as long as I had access to WiFi. Most of the reporters in the cavernous Mobile World Congress newsroom connected by the provided Ethernet, which fortunately left me the bandwidth I needed to beam my messages home.

I may try a different word processing app, as it was not always easy to copy and paste Office HD files into a blog. I could email them as Word documents, though. A quick test with Goodreader seemed to work well.

The iPhone was a serviceable camera, though many of the images it took were slightly "soft." It helped to hold the phone against a wall or nearby post while shooting in low light, but only marginally. It was, however, a delight to wander around the exhibition and quickly whip the phone out of my pocket when I stumbled upon a good scene. I could also use my 3G connection to send photos back to the States right from the floor, and I even took a few video clips.

The limitations

Where the mobile combo fell apart was integrating the photos with the copy. I found an app that would let me move images from phone to iPad after Apple's Photo Stream option died on me. But when I tried to upload my shots to a site with one of those "Browse your computer" boxes, I was out of luck. The iPad has no hard drive nor central filing system, so there is nothing to browse to but the iPhoto albums. The RJI blog doesn't have a special plug-in to retrieve from iPhoto, so I had to email my photos to the tech wizard at RJI to be added later.

That lack of a hard drive also caused me to stumble a couple of times when I wanted to look up a document I knew was stored on my computer. I would have been OK if I had thought to put the document in Evernote or Dropbox, but I don't always think things through.

Not that my lack of forethought is always bad. Had I mulled it over more than the few minutes until I caught the train to Mobile World Congress, I doubt that I would have had the courage to walk out in my technological birthday suit.

But don't expect me to show up without my shirt.

Clyde Bentley is an associate professor in print and digital news at the Missouri School of Journalism and was a 2010 fellow to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. He worked for 25 years in the newspaper industry before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 2000. Bentley also studied at the Poynter Institute, the University of Texas and the American Press Institute before joining the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001. His research focuses on citizen journalism, emerging technologies in journalism and the habits, preferences and comfort levels of digital media consumers.

It's hard to find one of the 500 seats in the newsroom empty as journalists from around the world file stories for specialty newspapers, websites and blogs. Unfortunately, few journalism schools can boast about placing their alums here.

Technology journalism is booming.

"There are lots of jobs out there," said Kerry Davis, a recent M.A. grad from the University of Maryland. "But I don't know anyone out there teaching people how to do it."

Davis is an experienced broadcast journalist hired by IDG News Service when it wanted to expand into multimedia coverage. She is enjoying her success, even though "some of what they say goes right over my head."

A new vernacular

Knowing the lingo of technology is an important visa to being accepted in the tech journalism world.

"This is different," said Marco Lombardi, veteran technology reporter for Milan's il Giornale. "We are learning it day to day."

A couple of years ago, one of my tech friends paid me an unusual compliment. He said, "You're not a geek, but you speak geek." I frankly fake it much of the time, but the point was that one does not need to be a programer to move comfortably through the tech world. As the newsroom here at MWC attests, the world is in desperate need of journalists who can translate what technologists say into a language we lesser beings can understand.

The Need for Institutional Learning

Right now, most of the tech journalists say they learned their specialty on the job. But that job could be much easier to obtain with a few extra college-level courses.

"They really need to learn IT history," said Simon Lee of Cisco. Lee is global client services executive for Cisco and a key source for journalists. He said coursework that would give journalism students the background to the technology world and an overview of how systems work would be invaluable.

But to survive in the tech journalism world, reporters need consumer behavior expertise.

It's important to be able to explain the technology, Lee explained, but doubly important to be able to figure out why the consumer is interested in it. That's the difference between someone who "speaks geek" and a reporter who earns a name in this brave new world.

A version of this post also appeared on the blog for Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Clyde Bentley is an associate professor in print and digital news at the Missouri School of Journalism and was a 2010 fellow to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute. He worked for 25 years in the newspaper industry before earning his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 2000. Bentley also studied at the Poynter Institute, the University of Texas and the American Press Institute before joining the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001. His research focuses on citizen journalism, emerging technologies in journalism and the habits, preferences and comfort levels of digital media consumers.

Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we're happy to have Clyde Bentley filling in as a special guest blogger. Bentley is an associate professor for convergence journalism at the University of Missouri. Bentley helped start the MyMissourian grassroots journalism hub, and teaches students how to incorporate interactivity into their journalism. His research team hosts its own blog, The Cyberbrains. Glaser will return to the blog next Monday.

Here's the quiz of the day for 21st Century Journalism 101: What makes news critics howl, able reporters swoon and strong editors weep? (Hint: The great unwashed and untutored of the blogosphere consider them pure manna.)

If I could squeeze another cliche into that first paragraph, I would. As long as it helped generate the answer to the quiz:

"Comments."

I spent a good part of this now-fading year talking with bloggers, commiserating with news folk, goading students into establishing blogs while dipping my own cyber pen into the blog pot frequently. Back in January I believed that the difference between blogging and journalism was primarily content and style. But as December nears, I have come to realize the chief factor may be self-confidence.

Explained in academic jargon, journalists buffer their social insecurity with a pantheon of self-fulfilling ideals and professional standards that exclude regulation and intervention by exterior influences.

Or as the "real" bloggers repeatedly tell me, journalists are a bunch of gutless wimps.

When we first introduced staff blogs to the traditional journalism world, it seemed a refreshing opportunity to give more of us a try at column writing. But when the IT people toggled the "allow comments" option, all hell broke loose.

Many of us grew up in a business where the end of the story was the end of the story. Period. The inarticulate sniping of a few know-it-alls adds nothing to the day's report. Besides, they were embarrassing. So if we couldn't block comments altogether, we put up walls of rules to diminish them.

Meanwhile the battle cry from rank-and-file bloggers is "bring 'em on." Comments have become the measure of success in many blogging systems. The editors for the big MyFOX system I use in St. Louis, for instance, pick the featured blogs for the home page largely on how many comments they have generated.

I experimented with the impact of comments this fall by having two sets of Mizzou journalism students post to the Fox system. The first set came from an editorial-writing class. They were only marginally intimidated by the prospect of comments -- they were, after all, subjective opinion writers. It was the immediacy, personal tone and volume of comments that took them aback.

After a rough couple of weeks, my Op-Ed crew learned what hot buttons worked and how to keep the conversation boiling. The students soon reveled in getting 30 or 40 comments per post.

The other students were more traditional journalists. Although they had studied citizen journalism, they were shocked at the lack of interest from the blog world when they wrote informative, well-crafted and traditional essays. They argued that no journalists need cater to the commenting public -- good journalism is good journalism. As one said, "I don't mind comments as long as they are valuable comments." Going by her definition of "valuable," of course.

That's pretty close to where I started this year. It doesn't take much number crunching, however, to demonstrate that we have already lost that battle. Technorati reported that there are 175,000 new blogs launched each day -- two per second. If just 1% of those carry credible journalistic information we have more new sources of "journalism" each day than we have daily newspapers in the United States. One could also argue that the remaining 99% have voted with their keyboards on whether the traditional media system has everything they need.

When I moved from the newsroom to the university, I was rather shaken to find how uninformed I had been about the influences on my own profession. The key benefit of professorship for me is having the time to research and think about problems rather than to just react to them. The more I look, the less evidence I find to support my assumptions about what information interests people, how they value it and what they believe.

Sometimes now I don't even need the research databases for pointed guidance. A host of critics with names like Mr. Wildflower, LadyFireman, Weird and AMom offer in-course corrections every time I blog.

In the long, round-about way we love in academia, I return to my original point. Bloggers feel no obligation to be 100% correct. But they have supreme confidence in the validity of their posts. If they are wrong, no big deal! There will be a dozen comments to either set the record straight or at least keep the pot boiling.

But journalists are steeped in a culture of insecurity. We send our stories through a gauntlet of copy editors. We fact-check the quotes. And we buffer every statement we can with "allegedly" and "according to..."

Is it any wonder that we fear comments? Errors are sins. Comments point out errors and therefore damn us to media hell.

In theory, we journalists thrive in the public sphere. In reality, we find it a very scary place.

But I'm working on it. A professional site like this is a safe-haven -- at best I'll get two or three comments from my peers. But after I work up my nerve, I'll post this URL to one of the common-folk sites and let the avatars have at me. LOL! If we want to survive in their world, we have to believe in NGNG.

No guts, no glory.

Mark Glaser is away on vacation this week, but we're happy to have Clyde Bentley filling in as a special guest blogger. Bentley is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Missouri. Bentley helped start the MyMissourian grassroots journalism hub, and teaches students how to incorporate interactivity into their journalism. His research team hosts its own blog, The Cyberbrains . Glaser will return to the blog next Monday.

An AP technology story out of Japan hit home week. It detailed how young folk in Asia are abandoning the PC by the drove.

I'm almost with them. Young Japanese like Masaya Igarashi want gaming toys, music players -- and "computers" that fit in their pockets. I'm convinced we are all heading that way.

Twice in the past year I have had a powerful computer riding in my jeans via loaner smartphones from Nokia. But unlike Masaya and friends, I was looking for a portable newsroom rather than a miniature dorm room. And we are nearly there.

I first wrote about what I call pocket journalism for Online Journalism Review last December after spending the fall in London with the N93 smart phone. But I first fell in love with them on a 2006 trip to Seoul, where I found many of my journalist colleagues leaving the laptop behind with supreme confidence.

This fall I had the chance to test Nokia's new wonder, the N95. To say I was bowled over is an understatement. But there is no getting around the fact that I was also disappointed.

The techies at the Missouri School of Journalism joke that I can break any piece of equipment they hand me. But that's often because I go out of my way to try. I believe that one of the roles of a major journalism school is to give both hardware and software tough and realistic tests. I'm not very interested in gadgets designed for consumers. I want to know how they will stand up to a working journalist. That's why I passed on the iPhone. While it is elegant, simple and cool beyond belief, it is basically a "player" in the genre of a TV set, radio or a printed page.

The new smart phones out of Scandinavia and Asia, however, are full-bore computers. I was amazed at both the N93 and N95. Every time I was about to exclaim "gotcha!," I was able to dig through the tome-like user manual for an answer. Calling home is just a minor feature of these smartphones. Both had WiFi, the Office suite and access to a good selection of Symbian OS software. And FM radios. And MP3/MP4 players. OK, even GPS navigators and barcode scanners.

I was first attracted to the phones, however, by their cameras. The older N93 is a big honker as phones go, but it has a powerful optical zoom lens for its 3.15 megapixel still and VGA camera. The N95 has a 5 megapixel camera, but only a digital zoom. That makes the resolution about even when you zoom to 20 feet. And you can edit the heck out of the results with the included software.

Pretty slick if you are a tourist, but the addition of one accessory made it a portable office. Think Outside makes a full-size Stowaway keyboard that connected to the phone via Bluetooth and folded into a wallet-sized rectangle that fit into my back pocket.

The Fragility of Pocket Journalism

I have since waxed poetic about pocket journalism to professionals and academics alike. Both phones produced publishable photos and videos, though the still photos were noticeably better with the N93. In Europe, one can be online anywhere via fast G3 cell links. In the U.S. you can fake it on EDGE. But in both places I could go to a coffee shop, whip out the phone and keyboard and use WiFi to write, edit and file stories, photos and video. Then I could put both in my pockets and walk away without my badge-like briefcase.

That all went well until I ramped up the test in Mizzou's real-life news operation. Journalism doesn't play fair. It requires you to work in ungodly conditions, be able to grab a quote or an image in an instant and communicate at the drop of a hat.

I found that to effectively replace a laptop with the current crop of smartphones, a journalist needs the eyes of a 20-year old, the fingertips of an elf and the tenderness of a surgeon. Tiny is tiny, no matter how you look at it. I couldn't get the knack of quickly switching to audio recorder, photographing a poorly-lit subject on the go and texting the office while walking out of the meeting.

But it was my lack of tenderness that did in the N95. Recalling the many times I've scrambled to an accident scene, I dropped the Nokia into my pocket and stumbled down the hill to the fishing hole behind my house. By the time I reached the bottom, the screen on the phone was shattered.

Unprotected large LCD phones don't stand up well to the front-pocket flex of deep-knee clambering. I nearly cried when I saw what had happened to the N95 - though I was delighted to find it still worked well enough to film the bass I caught.

With all my heart I want a fancy smartphone. The hell of it is that journalists don't need the wonderfully stylish technology we all write about. We need basic tools that will stand up to regular abuse. I think the N93 would have survived my hike because it is a thick flip phone. But no flat-faced phone should be carried outside of a suit pocket or a purse. Especially if it costs $800 or more.

I'm still confident that, like those Japanese teens, our computing future is pocket-sized. But journalists will need fast, Hummer-tough units accessible to 50-something eyes and fingers. There is not much of a market for that yet. But just as Panasonic finally introduced a laptop that will take a drop from a pressbox table, it is only a matter of time before the smartphone makers will give us a unit that survive Clyde the Breaker.

The unusual structure of the The Missouri School of Journalism makes it an ideal laboratory for integrating traditional journalism education and user-generated content. We operate no "student" publications. The daily newspaper, the NBC TV station, our various magazines and radio station are staffed by students, managed by professional journalists but aimed at the general public of Columbia, MO.

So when we launched MyMissourian.com in 2004, we had ready access to working moms, retired carpenters, stressed-out business owners and all the other normal people who make up a community in the middle of America. So getting my journalism students to understand the appeal of citizen journalism should have been easy, right?

Very wrong. One of the hardest lessons that I have learned from the MyMissourian project is that traditionally trained journalists often have close to the least sense of "community" in the community itself. And it's even worse for student journalists.

Given the school's reputation, it is no surprise that journalism students flock to Missouri from around the world filled with enthusiasm, incredible talent and sharp wits. But like all students, they come to a place like Columbia for the school, not the town. Most will someday return as proud alumni, but few long for that three-bedroom split-level on the edge of town.

So the first strike in citizen journalism for almost all students is that they really don't give a damn about community. That's not really a problem for traditional journalism, where we teach you how to "cover." In a nutshell, that means the journalist does a bit of research, talks to a few contacts, writes a good report and goes on to the next subject. You can parachute a well-trained journalist into any town and get a reasonably good story.

Citizen journalists, however, "share" their stories. The research for the story is in their souls and they live the subject about which they write. Community is everything to them.

If we could just get non-professionals to contribute to our publications without prodding, citizen journalism would be easy. But anyone who has tried it knows there is no Field of Dreams: If you create a website, they won't necessarily come.

I chatted about this over coffee last week with Lew Friedland of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lew also directs Madison Commons, a project similar to MyMissourian.

'It's just hard work. Very hard work," Lew said of our mutual efforts to develop citizen journalism within a traditional organization. "And it's not cheap."

Delivering the Story with a Soft Touch

For journalism professors and their students, that's good news. It means we will need talented journalists to ensure the flow of content from the users. But it also means we need to develop a journalism curriculum that focuses on delivering the story with the soft touch of a symphony conductor rather than the loud improvisation of a soloist.

That's an unnatural state of being for both my professional colleagues and the students I teach. The former are generally too young to remember when newspapers eliminated their "community notes" society pages and stringers in the mid-1970s to cope with the great newsprint shortage. And the latter will freely tell you their major motivation for a journalism career is to write (well, and to avoid math).

So what to do? Ours is a work in progress, but the curriculum we have developed is making headway. All instruction at Mizzou is based on what we have called the Missouri Method for 99 years. That simply means that classroom instruction is tightly coupled with real-world experience -- which is why we operate all those competitive media products. And here is how it works for citizen journalism:

> All students in our citizen journalism course start with a 50-stop community orientation tour. At each stop they must take a photo, which they post on a Flickr or Photobucket site. This not only gets them beyond the bar district in Columbia, but teaches them to use photo-sharing software.

> Students are assigned to beats, but in roles more akin to city editors than reporters. They are charged with developing their own string of contributors -- both helping them input to the system and editing their copy.

> They are thoroughly drilled on the gentle touch of citizen journalism editing -- readability rather than AP style, passion rather than just facts, personality rather than objectivity. This may be their toughest lesson, as it counters what they have learned in every other class for four years.

> They participate in a "snapshot" program that puts staff in the field to take those grip-and-grin event photos that newspapers traditionally spurn. As Morris found with its Spotted feature, these silly pictures of grinning community folk are immensely popular -- even if they irritate the heck out of our photojournalism people.

> They find and develop a blogger. This introduces them to the blogosphere as a story source. Each student is to find a local blogger whose site can be listed on MyMissourian and who will give us permission to run individual posts on our site. That means the students also have to read the blogs with an eye for their reader value.

> They blog themselves. Over the term this has ranged from low-readership Blogger sites styled on newspaper staff blogs to the current free-for-all on Fox2-STL's 15,000-strong blog site. Dealing with comments is a big eye-opener -- but more on that another time.

> They dig through all the research, discussion lists, websites and visiting speakers I can throw at them.

And for the first six weeks of the term, they hate it.

Eventually, though, almost every student in the class comes to realize that this is very good preparation for traditional journalism. They learn their audience inside and out. They learn to neither dismiss the Little League story nor to overrate the city council story. They learn patience. And they learn that readers are real people.

Citizen journalism classes in J-schools arguably prep students for jobs that seldom yet exist. But the real lesson may be to the professor and the industry alike as we poke holes in our traditional curriculum.