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The BBC’s recent experiment with mobile journalism is a good example of its multimedia approach to news in action.

Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones headed out to the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig in Barcelona to cover the event for TV, radio and online.

Given that cellphones were the focus, it proved a suitable event to try out using mobiles as newsgathering tools. The phone was a Nokia N95 which Reuters has also been testing.

Rory Cellan-Jones introduced the mojo project like this:

I’m off to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday. Our very compact two-man team (me plus camera/lights/sound/editing specialist Peter Page) is hoping to bring BBC viewers, listeners and readers coverage of the most interesting products and stories from this annual shindig of the mobile industry.

What makes this project stand out is not the use of mobiles, but the fact that it was conceived from the start as a multiplatform project.

Rory filed polished pieces for TV, reports for radio, mobile video for the blog, and of course there were news stories and features on BBCNews.com.

The BBC tech team have grandly dubbed the project, The Mobile Future. Or as Rory called it in one of the videos, wobblevision.

If you want to get an idea of the differences between the professionally shot reports and the mobile footage, it has been compiled here.

Rory shared his experiences of how things went, what worked, and what didn’t on the BBC technology blog. As he explains, mobile video is not intended to replace a professionally shot and edited TV piece. But it does allow reporters to gather snapshots of a story in video. One big area for improvement is audio, as the built-in mic on the N95 could be better.

Material shot on a mobile phone will never replace the real thing - but I think it can be a useful addition to our professional toolkit. Mind you, I think it might be worth investing in a mini tripod and an external microphone.

This is not a case of either or. It is about considering what is the most suitable way to tell a story, rather than simply repurposing content produced for one medium for another. Short clips shot on a mobile capture an aspect of a story and tend to work well online, whereas TV reports add little value to a news website.

The editor of the BBC news website, Steve Herrmann, acknowledged that mobile reporting was “a bit different from what we normally do”.

The video is no-frills, quick and simple compared with what we might normally do, and it is decidedly rough around the edges, but it has immediacy and gets across the information.

The BBC plans to experiment with mobile reporting when technology editor Darren Waters heads out to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. As well as the usual reporter’s gear, Darren plans to record on an N95, upload via Shozu, which will post the video to Blip.TV or directly to the BBC blog.

This post is part of the Carnival of Blogging, which is hosted this month by the Innovation in College Media blog.