Of course I've thought of it, but I don't seem to have a whole story to tell. I seem better at coming up with plot devices and mcguffins.

A reporter, eh? A journalist these days is tightly bound to electronic communications. That does sharpen the point. You might think about what a modern journalist might be carrying on duty, and what can be macgyvered out of it (Ahhh MacGyver, a show built entirely on plot devices and mcguffins). This risks becoming a hardware story, but I'd expect a reporter to be carrying a rich toolkit. If she works internationally, a power adapter; and if international, her cell phone might be multiband. Multiple data cables and adapters in any scenario. A battery charger and multiplug "octopus" harness for all the devices. Digital still camera for sure, professional-grade Canon; and probably a small digital video camera like the Flip in addition ($100, HD quality, top reviews).

I've been toying with building a device for my university client to support producing videos of instructors, that'd also be useful for digital journalism. It's based on one of those small netbook computers, with a 3G or 4G data connection. The built-in webcam suffices for quick shots, augmented by a plug-in USB high-end Webcam like the Logitech 9000, which can produce top-rez HD images. The video and audio is stored on the netbook hard drive, and also streamed in realtime to a server somewhere, where it's rebroadcast on the net or cached there. The video might be stored at full-res on the netbook, but reduced in size and highly compressed to be streamed, which opens up a plot device in which the video that other people are seeing is unclear and ambiguous, and the original full-res becomes a mcguffin to pursue in order to see some crucial detail.

Available bandwidth would determine which of the netbook's media options to use. If you have only a slow connection (hey, maybe for comic relief, an old acoustic modem?), you file your stories as text only. A little more bandwidth and you can manage voice (high-end modem, low-end digital like DSL); and with cable modem speeds and above (greater than a megabit/second) you can send video.

Also note that the bandwidth requirements are different in realtime as opposed to uploading a file. Even if you don't have bandwidth to stream video in realtime, you can record it, and then upload it slowly. Another plot device: the tension waiting for enough of the video to accumulate to start playing. I'm seeing the hoary movie cliche of a status bar creeping along the screen...but a more likely scene is the video accumulating frame by frame, like watching images arriving from deep space. Imagine, a frame finishes and you see an arm holding a knife poised ready to strike somebody. What's in the next frame? Frame after frame, excruciatingly slowly, you see the knife descend...)

This is so much fun.