How mobile hotspots help enable modern journalism

To tell this important environmental story, a reporting team from The Washington Post was dispatched to rural Montana to document the burn for a piece about the ecological impact of increasingly destructive wildfires that scorch the western United States each year. In 2020 and 2021, roughly 118,000 wildfires burned more than 17 million acres across the country. A big challenge, however, was securing cellular connectivity in the rural locale. This lack of network coverage could have had major implications for how the story could have been told and prevented the team from communicating with the newsroom for days—had it not been for one indispensable piece of technology: an AT&T-connected mobile hotspot. With the hotspot, the reporters were able to connect to the internet via 5G and stay in seamless contact with their colleagues in Washington, D.C., as well as share with them data-heavy files from the reporting site.

“Having the mobile hotspot was essential,” Jenna Pirog, deputy editor of strategic initiatives for The Post and one of the reporters in Montana said. “Being able to get a connection and send back visual material quickly—that’s one of the top things journalists need.”

Two fundamental characteristics define journalism today: speed and innovation. It has become imperative for reporters to match the quickening pace of the 24-hour news cycle. And as technology progresses, so too have audience’s expectations for how these stories are told, with increasing demand for rich multimedia content such as audio, video and immersive 3-D visuals. Mobile hotspots are key to delivering on these points.

Mobile hotspots are portable Wi-Fi devices that connect a reporter’s laptop to the internet using cellular signals like 4G or 5G. With AT&T-connected mobile hotspots, journalists are able to communicate, collaborate and share data-heavy files as events are unfolding, from anywhere a cellular signal is available, resulting in more immediate and ambitious storytelling.

“These devices give reporters opportunities to deliver the news when it’s happening in a way that’s easily consumable to viewers,” said Jason Inskeep, director of AT&T Business’s 5G Center of Excellence.

As part of The Post’s multimedia feature on prescribed burns in Montana, for example, the team used a drone to take hundreds of detailed aerial images of the area that were later stitched together to create what looks like a satellite map. This map, called an orthophoto map, can be used as a base to overlay other geographic information; Pirog believes it could be particularly interesting to deploy around natural disasters including hurricanes, tornadoes and, yes, wildfires, “to map an area before something happened and then after to compare the two,” she said.

The AT&T-connected mobile hotspot played an integral role in allowing the Washington Post team to gather the images they needed to create the orthophoto map. Before the reporters could get the drone into the air, they needed a Wi-Fi signal to download a map of the area to the drone and create a flight plan. The mobile hotspot also helped pilot the drone. When the journalists tried turning the hotspot off mid-flight, they lost access to a detailed satellite image and could only view a standard street map.

“A standard street map is not helpful when you’re trying to get around this one tree and up and down that ridge,” Pirog said.

Afterward, the team was able to swiftly transfer hundreds of detailed images to the team back in Washington, D.C. to quickly stitch together, making sure that the reporters on the ground gathered all the necessary material.

“Having the ability to send something quickly from the field and ask, ‘Am I doing this right? Does this look good?’ was really valuable,” Pirog said. “And upload speed was essential for that.”

In the future, being able to equip journalists with their own mobile hotspots will be extremely valuable, Pirog says. “The technology obviously exists, but being able to integrate it even more into our processes will help us share data-files efficiently on more projects, and of course be the first to report on big issues, which is always key,” she noted. “There's a million different ways to use mobile hotspots in the field, whether it’s breaking news or red carpet coverage.”

Reporting from the field will continue to benefit from ongoing innovation in wireless network technology. 5G is faster and will eventually be more reliable than previous generations of cellular. And as 5G becomes more readily available in more areas, journalists from The Post and other news organizations will increasingly be able to use mobile hotspots and connected devices to execute ambitious field-based projects.

“With 5G, reporters can begin to look at utilizing different data-heavy storytelling applications, such as virtual reality,” noted Inskeep. “The expansion of the next-generation network will enable journalists to stay better connected and create these experiences from more places.”

Pirog notes that being able to experiment with technology out in the field—like she did in Montana—is vital to laying the foundation for other use cases in the years ahead.

“There’s a huge learning curve anytime you’re trying some new type of storytelling technology,” she said. “These types of trial assignments help us understand what journalists need in the field.”