Kristine Lowe

Newspaper struggles to grade its journalists

How do you measure your journalists' productivity? That is a conondrum the management at Sandefjord's Blad, a Norwegian regional newspaper, currently is working hard to solve.

So far the management at the Mecom-owned newspaper is measuring the size of the journalists' articles. For that purpose the managers have come with a points system akin to the Eurovison Song Contest, or Weight Watchers for that matter: 6 points for page leads, 3 points for smaller stories and 1 point for briefs. Ideally, a journalist should score at least 12 points a day. Now in all fairness it should be said that this system is not only used to measure individual journalists, but also to measure production flow and how the organisation can work more effectively. However, one problem the newspaper's management has yet to solve is: how do you measure quality? Editor Vibeke Jörgensen told a colleague at Journalisten.no this was both a demanding and exciting challenge.

Personally I'm more partial to a suggestion from one of Journalisten's readers last year that all journalists should come with a product declaration - declaring all affiliations in politics, business etc - but that is perhaps a subject for a different blog post...

Do we need rules for journalists’ use of social media?

Are you a journalist 24/7? Does the company you work for own you? Does it harm your credibility as a journalist if you share personal opinions online? Are some opinions more appropriate to share than others?

These are just some of many questions raised by the recent debates on journalists and social media. Some companies, such as Bloomberg, have very strict policies on how journalists may or may not use social media, but in Norway such rules have been absent until now.

However, it was recently brought to my attention that several of the country’s biggest media organisations are working on social media rules for their journalists, which caused The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA), an organisation I’m heading, to host a debate on this last week.

The reason? We thought it was much better to get such a debate out in the open than have it confined by the walls of each individual media company. If Norwegian is not Greek to you, you’ll find video and notes from the debate over at NONA’s blog, but as these are questions many media organisations are discussing these days, I’ve also translated some key quotes and questions here:

"The home alone party is over"
'The home alone party is over, now the adults are back and they want rules,' said Jan Omdahl, internet and technology commentator for Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet. He said Dagbladet’s journalists had been playing around with social media from an early stage, but now the media executives had entered the arena, demanding rules.

'It’s very typical that those who don’t use social media, or have started using it very recently, want rules, whereas those who have used social media a lot take the contrary view,' said Nina Nordbö, a social media advisor at Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) and NONA board member.

'It is perhaps our smallest problem that we lack rules for social media. At the same time one of our biggest problems is that we are part of a tradition for one-way communication that makes us ill-equipped for exploiting the social web,' said Espen Egil Hansen, editor-in-chief of VG.no and NONA board member.

Grey areas
He felt it as important that we learned how to utilise this arena, and make our mistakes now rather than later. He also emphasised that VG.no had strict rules on ethics and he couldn’t see that they needed any more rules than these.

However, Omdahl also pointed out that journalists encounter a whole new set of challenges online. ’Even if I as a social media user think we can just continue as we always have done, I do see that we can benefit from raising awareness about these challenges. For instance: should I reply when I get questions on Twitter about why Dagbladet has used five different angles on that sex podcast on NRK.no? Should I confer with my bosses before I reply? Is it appropriate that I share my opinions on one of our most heavily criticised front pages?'

Guidelines or rules
Hanne Kirkenes from ABCNyheter.no pointed out that in their organisation it was not the editors but the journalists who had asked for rules.

'In my experience, our journalists are divided: those who take to social media very naturally and those who think journalists should not be using social media at all,' she said, explaining that as a result of this they had a few simple guidelines on social media. They also had held internal discussions on this and would continue to do so.

John Einar Sandvand, a digital strategist with Aftenposten, Norway’s newspaper of record, explained that his company was in the process of implementing rules for how their journalists use social media, but suggested three very simple ones:

'For social media I would start with three very basic principles, and then one can elaborate on each of these according to specific issues:

1) The media company should be genuinely positive to its staff being active in social media

2) Social media activities must be done in a way which maintains the professional integrity of journalists

3) Stay loyal to your employer

You can read more about his thoughts on this on his excellent blog Beta Tales (in English).

Impartiality, sources and PR
We touched on several other issues which tend to come up in one form or another whenever journalists' use of social media is up for discussion, hence I'll just mention three of these briefly here: 

Impartiality: Can a blogger with a strong political agenda or view on a particular issue work as a journalist? Or would it be more useful to ask if a journalist or commentator can do more credible journalism when we know his our her agenda? Espen Egil Hansen suggested that bloggers were blurring the lines between reporting and commenting, that commentators like Omdahl could still do credible journalism and that we in the future would see more journalists becoming individual brands .

Consensus: Is it a problem that journalists and commentators mostly just talk to their peers online, and does this not exacerbate media's herdlike behaviour? A Norwegian editor recently argued this was the case, that discussing their ideas on Twitter created a consensus among the country's commentators, and therefore we need rules to regulate media's use of social media. To this it was pointed out that hacks and columnists have always associated mostly with other media folks, but that at least on Twitter they do so openly and not behind closed doors in the press club - and on Twitter they also have (an opportunity) to engage with their readers and can make an effort to expand the network of people they talk and listen to.        

PR: Oh, and somebody asked if it wasn't problematic that marketeers and academics could get to know a journalist's interests so well on Twitter that they would know exactly which journalist to pitch a certain issue to. My answer? No, no, no: I would LOVE more targeted pitches, if all PRs and marketeers would make the effort to figure out what my beat is and what issues I'm likely to write about I would be absolutely delighted....

Update 23/11-09, 21:59 CET: see also Think Before You Re-Tweet: L.A. Times' Updates Social Media Rules for Journos.

Twitter mishaps and netiquette for journalists

Evidence suggests navigating the social web can be a bit of challenge for journalists, but does that mean we need a new set of ethical guidelines to safeguard their conduct?

Last week, while organising a debate on whether we need rules for journalists’ use of social media, I asked friends, colleagues and Twitter-followers for examples of journalists’ missteps and transgressions on the popular micro blogging site. My question threw up some interesting examples, and I’ll highlight some of those here.

Digital Doorstepping
But first I feel I should point out that, even though Twittiquette is the hot topic these days, it would be wrong to single out Twitter: these examples are very similar to journalists’ "missteps and transgressions" on other social media sites such as blogs and social networks.

For instance, only two years ago we had a similar discussion after bloggers and others reacted sharply to how some journalists solicited comments from bloggers who themselves experienced, or had friends who were caught up in, the Virginia Tech Massacre – leaving blog comments like "I would love to chat with you about this horrific event."

"Journalism has a long and dishonourable tradition of doorstepping the victims of tragedies. But in the digital age, the communities around the victims have voices to express their outrage at the media's behaviour - and that's what we're seeing here," said Adam Tinworth in a blog post.

Bullying your sources
Now, I’m not so sure it would not be entirely far-fetched to say that journalist have a long dishonourable tradition for bullying their sources either. However, it does look rather embarrassing when the bullying is conducted in a public place like Twitter, such as in this exchange between former National Post technology reporter David George-Cosh and marketing consultant April Dunsford earlier this year.

After Dunsford tweeted an observation from being interviewed by George-Cosh, leaving his name out of it, he identified himself when he answered back with some very aggressive tweets. You can read the whole exchange here. Ouch. There are of course situations where journalists feel bullying, e.g. politicians, is entirely legitimate, even create TV-shows devoted to it, but here?

Twitter reveals journalists have opinions
An entirely different kind of example is that of Odd Myklebust, society editor for Norwegian regional newspaper Drammens Tidenede, who, two weeks before this year’s Norwegian parliamentary election, tweeted that this year’s regional political candidates were the worst ever. This created an outcry and spurred a debate on journalists and social media, and Myklebust later apologised saying the statement was too tabloid.

This incident reminds me of the Washington Post’s new, much ridiculed social media policy which came about after one of its managing editors, Raju Narisetti posted a few tweets that revealed he had opinions on issues such as health care, deficits and term limits. Impartiality is crucial to the WaPo policy, and Techchrunch has a ball with it in Twitter Unearths A Secret: Journalists Have Opinions:

"When word leaked out that he had his own opinions and was sharing them on Twitter, apparently the WaPo top brass scrambled quickly to get this under control. That included Narisetti deleting his Twitter account. Pathetic."

On the Norwegian incident, Per Valebrokk, editor-in-chief of business news site E24, wrote: "If Myklebust really means what he said on Twitter, why doesn’t he write it in his newspaper? What is really the biggest problem? That those working in the media have opinions, or that they’re not clear enough in their newspapers?"

Now, I can’t get myself worked up over these incidents revealing journalists to have opinions, but I should also, for the record, mention, that I know Myklebust from my time as a columnist at Drammens Tidende (where I effectively started my media career).

Making offensive remarks, then deleting them
I think a worse case is that of The Daily Telegraph’s former technology blogger Milo Yiannopoulos. I remember reacting to the tone of several of his tweets when I followed him on Twitter, but one incident in particular was later brought to my attention by someone who followed the situation more closely.

"Back when he was @yiannopoulos rather than @nero, Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted that he hoped the police 'beat the shit out of those wankers', referring to the G20 protestors. Then he deleted the tweets when one was killed," this person said, and described how @yiannopoulos also made aggressive remarks to some tweeters and deleted the tweets once they had been seen - adding that unpleasantness seemed not to upset people so much as deleting your remarks once they had caused a stir.

What a lot of this comes down to, especially Yiannopoulos’ and George-Cosh’s cases, is bad editorial judgements. If editors see one of their reporters or commentators make such ill-informed judgements repeatedly online, I imagine they would question how well this person is suited to represent the media company and at the very least have serious talk with the person in question. Also, we can all make gaffes, say things that are not well thought through, but most people recognise this - and apologising for it makes all the difference.

Personally, I don’t think a whole new set of rules is called for, but I organised a debate on this issue last week for The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) as it had been brought to my attention that rules are under way in Norway’s biggest media organisations. It proved a very constructive and useful debate, and I’ll get back to some of the key points raised in a separate post.

Essential Advice
Still, this debate reminds me of something I copied from my friend Adriana’s blog several years ago, in 2006 I believe, and have often used when explaining netiquette to various audiences:

"On the internet you are not an institution. If you want to be and behave like one, you get isolated and bypassed... It's back to communication between human beings, communities and sometimes mobs. The rules of social interactions apply - if people challenge you on something you have done or said and you don't respond, expect a commensurate impact on your reputation or credibility.

"If people make fun of you or try to embarrass you, the choice is to remain silent in hope of appearing dignified or to shoot back, with indignation or with humour. It depends. Different responses will be appropriate at different times and different circumstances. That is why etiquette is so complicated. Media and communications strategies don't even come close. The main difference is that you don't need to be 'trained' for online communication; it's the one that you already know. And whether you are good at it or not has nothing to do with communication skills but with respect for others and some good manners."

This post has been edited following Milo Yiannopoulos' objections in the comments.

My first meeting with tabloid media and the dog who saved my life

Incidentally, this is the title of an old post I never got around to finishing, but, since I used this story last week for a column I write, I thought I’d finally make an attempt of blogging about it.

Now what got me thinking about this old, and rather personal story, was when Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet ran with a very controversial front page depicting the erratic behaviour of a Norwegian on trial for murder in Congo.A montage of photos of him appearing to be psychotic was accompanied by the title "See How Sick He Is".

Following massive protests about the front page, many of the most vocal ones on micro blogging site Twitter, Dagbladet did apologise for what it dubbed its ”unmusical” coverage, though also ran a story with the Congo-prisoner’s mother saying the media should not stop showing how ill her son was as the most important thing for her was him getting proper help.

Media violations

What readers and commentators seemed to find most disturbing about this front page was how it depicted a man who was clearly mentally ill and should be spared media’s spotlight, accompanied by a title most found to be in very bad taste. However, what I felt was lacking in the debate that followed was how this kind of media ”violation” is not unusual. We saw it after the Tsunami in 2004, after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 and have seen and see it in countless other instances.

Media’s handling of vulnerable people - either in a state of shock, or mentally ill people who provoke, or are caught up in, big news events - is a minefield, and one I am all too familiar with. When I was 17 I was run down by a car while out walking, and left to die next to a deserted forest road. Unconscious, bleeding heavily, face down in the snow and not visible from the road, I would not have been here today if it had not been for my dog getting help, but that’s another story (I’ve touched on it here, a friend has written more here).

Harsh meeting with the tabloid press

When the case came to court, a seemingly stressed reporter showed up and only wanted a quick photo, as it seemed he’d already written the story, at least in his mind. The photo he wanted was of me shaking hands with the guy who ran me down and left me to die, and the headline would be ”I forgive you”.

He never got that photo. Not because I have a burning hatred against the perpetrator, I had no memory of the car accident, still don’t, and everything that happened just seemed surreal to me when the case came to court. But something in me made me refuse, albeit hesitantly. I had to say no several times for the reporter to get the message, but the whole thing was so surreal to me that, looking back, I know, had I been approached differently, I might have accepted the proposition and lived to regret it.

Shock and fear

Today, I can see that I was still in a state of shock. This was quite some time after the accident, I don’t remember the year, but I lost my sense of fear for several years after the accident. When you wake up in a hospital just to be told you almost died in an accident you have no memory of it seems pointless to go around worrying about all the bad things that can happen. It had already happened.

Now, loosing my sense of fear was not entirely a bad thing, against all odds I accomplished a lot career wise in those years, but today I can acknowledge that I either I had a prolonged shock-like reaction to a near-death experience, or I had a slight change of personality.

Not black and white

The reason I’m sharing this story is not to crucify the reporter in question, rather I wanted to illustrate how difficult it can be to judge when a person is in shock or not. There are ethical boundaries it never is acceptable to break - and I would argue that in my case the reporter was trying to manufacture news rather than report it, which I don’t have much sympathy for.

Still, a lot of the time these cases are not black and white, though it is also worth reflecting on how the kind of opportunism the reporter in my case showed, is something often encouraged in reporters - admired even.

The "strong, human angle"

As a reporter you do want to talk with eyewitnesses after events like the Tsunami, or with the victim in court cases ranging from traffic accidents to rape, but they will for obvious reasons be affected by what they’ve experienced, and news values may crash with human concerns. The hunt for a ”strong human angle” may lead reporters to pay too little heed to the state of mind their interview-objects are in, which in this day and age often will cause not only strong reactions from those caught up in the event, but often also a backlash against the media organisation the reporters represents.

I find this last bit both comforting and encouraging: in a world where social media radically lowers the barrier for making your opinion heard, media organisations are frequently held to court for the decisions they make, and sometimes forced to apologise, even when media practitioners all to well understand the rationale for those ”unmusical decisions”.

At the scene of the accident in 1994, almost a year after it happened

Talking of ethics: I shall be attending the Institute of Communication Ethics’ annual conference in Coventry today, followed by a seminar on journalism in crisis at Coventry University. (BTW, this post was written hurriedly on the train with a crap web connection, so not had the time to read thru it properly).

CAR-journalism: Tax day, Facebook-apps and Nosy Neighbours

It’s that day of the year: the tax lists are made public in Norway and the country’s hacks have been up since the wee hours, working hard to provide us with new ways to pry into our neighbours' earnings - and those of the rich, powerful and famous.

The term ”Big brother is watching you” springs to mind; though it is more like a whole army of David’s watching you. Norwegian news sites’ eager work to make the tax lists available means everyone and his dog can check up on how much you earned and taxed the previous year, and it proves an equally big ”click winner” each year.

This year a Facebook application which allows people to check what all their Norwegian Facebook friends earned and taxed last year is raising eyebrows. The application, provided by both the country’s main commercial TV channel, TV2, and the second most read tabloid, Dagbladet, is causing quite some outrage among my Twitter-friends, and a quick search on hashtags like #TV2fail and #skattelister shows they’re not the only ones.

It is possible to block these applications, which I must admit would be my natural inclination, but as a journalist I feel it would send the wrong signal even though I’ve never been a fan of how the tax lists are made available on tax day.

Ironically, it is perhaps the one example of computer assisted reporting (CAR) known to most Norwegians, but several of the CAR-specialists I know are sceptical to the kind of information the tax lists provide us with. They want more details of course, details that would have enabled them to make more useful comparisons that would tell us more about income divides related to geography, class, education etc, not only be a tool for nosy neighbours and envy as it mostly is today - and a rather imprecise tool at that.

Every year the tax lists contain a lot of mistakes, and the numbers can be very misleading because of the way they are presented. As someone who works both as a salaried journalist and as self-employed, I’ve certainly seen again and again that the tax lists tend to miss one of the two types of income. Sometimes the tax lists also contain genuine mistakes, and it’s peculiar how you can read about your tax status on news sites before you get the actual letter from the tax office informing you of it.

If nothing else, this phenomena means Norwegians should have a stronger incentive to keep active social media profiles than most: it’s the best way to control your online identity and make sure the top Google hits on your name are stuff like your blog, your Twitter-, LinkedIn, Facebook profiles etc - and not your tax profile...

I must also admit it does feel good to be on my way to Bergen to host a meeting with Nick Diakopoulos on very different forms of CAR-journalism on a day like this (the talk is an open one, feel free to join us if you are in the vicinity).

Update: many thanks to Andreas for informing me that it is not the first year Facebook-apps such as the one described in this post have been available (in Norwegian).

Screengrabs below from last year's "Tax-day-journalism":

1) Tv2 on Norway's best earning editors, 2) Norway's public broadcaster (NRK) on princess Martha Louise's "heavenly income" from her angel school:

Shield law lunacy

In a world where journalism is in the danger of turning into a hobby, isn't it ironic that the US looks set to get a shield law that excludes non-salaried journalists from protection?

I've been following the slow progress of this potential new law for some time now, and I'm struck by how at odds its definition of who should be allowed to protect their sources is with the changing media landscape. I've previously bemoaned that it will offer no protection for the Dr Stockmanns of this world, but with the very nature of journalism and who committs valuable acts of journalism so much in flux, limiting the scope of this law to only protect salaried journalists seems very strange.

For one, bloggers, and outfits like Huffington Post, are increasingly providing valuable journalism, analysis and even investigations. Come to think of it, that has already been the case for years now, and I recently concluded in an article on blogging the crash (for a new book on the financial crash and the crisis in journalism) that some bloggers even covered the events leading up to the credit crisis better than traditional media.

This blog post over at Mediashift provides a good argument for why bloggers and citizen journalists deserve a shield law. But with the gloomy state of media finances these days, some are even predicting a future where (freelance) journalists will be forced to work for free. I'm not quite that pessimistic, but there is an uncomfortable grain of thruth or two in Charlie Beckett's post on Celibates, Priests or Toffs? The Future of Freelance.

Wikileaks, Kaupthing and the one per cent rule

Crowdsourcing is fascinating business. After Wikileaks recently published top secret information about loans made by Icelandic bank Kaupthing just before the country's economy went belly-up, Informationen.dk interviewed one of Wikileaks' founders, Daniel Schmitt.

It's an interesting interview, worth reading in full (use Google translate if Danish is Greek to you), but I was especially taken by this part:

"The question is if people would like to be James Bond, or if they're happy just watching him on TV. People would like to read news, they sometimes even get excited about what they read, but very often they don't bother readig the documentation. As a result, we are mostly dependent on big media writing about it before people can be bothered reading the documentation." (my translation).

For those familiar with the once per cent rule, this is hardly all that suprising, but in the larger scheme of things I found it worth noting. Not at least for those who are despondent about the future of journalism (where there's demand, a need to me met, there's a market, right?).

Court of appeal overturns Coveritlive-ban

Judge was out of his bounds when he banned a local reporter from covering a trial with Coveritlive, a Norwegian court of appeal has ruled.

In May a local court banned a reporter from Mecom-owned Drammens Tidende from using Coveritlive (CIL) to cover a court case, arguing that it may lead witnesses to adjust their explanations after following the live coverage and reader comments on CIL. The newspaper took the decision to an appeal court together with Norway's public broadcaster (NRK), whose local branch would also be affected by the ban.

About two hours ago, as I was first to report here (in Norwegian), news broke the appeal court had held in favour of the claimants - ruling that according to Norwegian law you either decide to open the trial for reporters fully or partially, but the law does not give a judge authority to issue additional regulations for how a reporter may cover a trial. I spoke to NRK's inhouse lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas who was very happy with the outcome and said principally it was an important case as it would set precendece.

Update 24.06.2009 10:30 CET: See also Laura Oliver's interview with Drammens Tidende's editor-in-chief about the case over at Journalism.co.uk

The Tyranny of International Index Rankings

International Index rankings are random and open to manipulation, an academic study suggest.

I'ts an illusion that Norway is the world's best country to live in, a Vg.no headline informed me this week, citing an academic paper by professor Karl Moene et al - but the article didn't link either to its award-winning source or the actual paper, which is here, and makes for very interesting reading.

I always thought there was something not quite right about those top ten lists of the best countries and cities to live in, especially since Norway and Oslo often bagged the top spot - and, frankly, I have lived in many better places. If I were to compare Oslo with Amsterdam, Brighton, London, Palo Alto, they would have very different pros and cons, and Oslo wouldn't be an obvious winner.

In fact, I'm inclined to think I had a better quality of life living in England than I have in Norway - especially if we disregard plumbing, housing and public transport;-) However, if I was still living in England, perhaps my conclusion would have been the opposite, and if I'd stayed in Palo Alto longer, perhaps that would have been my all-time favourite place to live. My inklings seem to be supported by the aforementioned study:

"International index rankings emphasize country differences where similarity is the dominant feature. The rankings of the Human Development Index, Freedom House, and Doing Business can be misleading, not because of wrong indicators, but because the estimation of the scores ignores inherent uncertainty. Re-estimated with a method that captures this uncertainty, it becomes clear that the practice of comparing adjacent countries is a rather courageous activity," the abstract reads.

It asserts that such rankings are close to useless when it comes to differentiating between Norway and other rich democracies, and are only useful for telling us who scores really high and low.

"One can hardly open a newspaper without finding a reference to an international index. International country rankings provide an instant idea of the relative success of a country vis-`a-vis other countries in the world.

"Their appeal lies in their simplicity. Their users need no more statistical knowledge than readers of the sports pages in the newspapers. Just as boxers and football teams are ranked according to their performance, countries are ranked according to their ability to provide a high standard of living, democratic rights, and an appealing business environment.

"Just as pundits use sport rankings to place their bets for the weekend, journalists use country rankings in their search for an easy way to finish their Saturday commentary and policy makers use the country indexes to guide their decisions over own policy and evaluate other countries. It seems like we are blessed with a tool that everybody can understand and that is appropriate for a wide range of purposes," reads the introduction.

I'm reminded of Jeremy Clarkson's less scientfic, but spot-on and immensly amusing take on international index rankings in "Let's be happy like the Danes"(2007), worth reading in full:

"Apparently the main reason why Danes claim to be so happy is that they always expect life to be worse than it really is. They expect to be cold. They expect to pay 95% tax. They expect to be decapitated by a gang of youths who’ve found the little mermaid has already had its head kicked off and are now looking for another target. They are therefore delighted when they get home to find their family still have all their limbs, that the heating is working and that their tax bill’s been reduced to 94%."

And as if to prove that human beings, especially a nation's guardians and those who are supposed to guard them, are vain creatures who sometimes find it easier to stir up a storm in a teacup than grapple with structural, long-term challenges that are not so easily or quickly resolved, professor Moene et al's study also warns:

"Media, policy makers and researchers often end up discussing the deep causes of a slight alteration in the internal [index] rankings. What is even more problematic, especially for the Doing Business Index, is that policy makers may design policies more to improve their rankings than to improve their real performance. Governments may be tempted to engage in what we denote “rank-seeking” behavior to improve the relative standing on the indexes more than the situation on the underlying phenomena." In other words, plenty of food for thought here, well worth a read.

Tienanmen + Twitter = Teheran. Journalistic balance + Social Media = Toast?

What's happening in Iran now tells us something important about Twitter as a news source and as a tool to help people self-organise, but why are mainstream commentators still struggling to get their heads around it?

My Twitter-feed is abuzz with people tweeting about and linking to stories on what's happening in Iran and what impact Twitter's key role in the uprising is having on mainstream media short-term, and will have for the long-term.

Many are those who are now predicting this will be the big shift in how we view the potential of social media. But just as I had pulled together a few of my favourite links on what was happening for a post at The Norwegian Online News Association's blog Monday morning, some of those less informed arguments against Twitter surfaced in an Op-ed in Norway's newspaper of record -leading to some interesting events and thoughts.

Twitter revolution?
Let me just recap and expand on some of those links I started with Monday morning for my international readers: First, I was taken by Antoine Clarke's thoughts on Tienanmen + Twitter = Teheran, an argument repeated often in the last few days - with Clay Shirky in his evangelic way even saying "This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media".

However, Richard Sambrook, whom I said on Monday has provided some of the most useful links from and about the upheavel in Iran on Twitter, urges us to call it an uprising, not a revolution, as what's happening is led by part of the political establishment in the country. He also provides an extremely useful analysis of using Twitter as a news source from Iran, concluding that it would probably serve only to mislead the average news consumer but would be more useful than mainstream media if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, the political situation in Iran etc.

Journalistic "balance" + Social Media = Toast?
Then, also via Twitter, I was alterted to an Op-Ed that repeated some of the usual logical fallacies about Twitter (in Norwegian). It wasn't a bad Op-Ed, in fact it was in part both fun and interesting, except it brought to court how journalists and politicians only used it to share trivia, and VIPs like the prime minister for oneway-communication, for the billionth time - not as arguments for how the VIPs don't get Twitter but as arguments against signing up to the microblogging service in the first place.

Three things occurred to me, and I'll start with the least scientific:

1) I wondered if the fact that these arguments are brought to court again and again is just a side-effect of (false) journalistic balance - as in: "Hey, we need some counterarguments, what should we say? Oh, yes: lots of people use it to share trivia and the prime minister never talks back." I'm reminded of the second rule journalism:

Be balanced. No matter what anybody says, find somebody to say the opposite. If a scientist claims to have a cure for cancer, find somebody who says cancer does not exist. If a man says "My name is Fred," make sure you find somebody who says "No, your name is Diane." Etc.

2) The Godfather of the Norwegian blogosphere, Hjorthen, put together a parody of the Aftenposten Op-Ed where he just exchanged 'Twitter' for 'Aftenposten' (also in Norwegian)- which threw up some brilliant formulations like how reading Aftenposten can easily become a continuation of garden parties in the posher parts of Oslo.

Demographically, Aftenposten is the Norwegian equivalent of The Times, and if you try exchanging Twitter for The Times next time you read one of those anti-Twitter articles it may lead to surprising insights. For one, Twitter is often accused of being elitist, attracting certain types of users, and for narrowing the users' horizon because they only follow people with similar values to their own - but all of those arguments could just as easily be used against The Times. For my part, I get a much broader pool of sources with much more diverse political agendas on Twitter than I'd ever get from reading newspapers, which leads me to the third argument:

3) I came to really appreciate the second part of this post by my friend Brian: "I’ve said it many times before, but it will bear constant repetition. When some new technique of communication is invented or stumbled upon, you should not judge its impact by picking ten uses of it at random, averaging them all out, and saying: Well that’s a load of trivial crap, isn’t it?!? How will “I am just about to make another slice of toast” change the world? The question to ask is: Of all the thousands of uses already being made of this thing, which one is the most significant? And then: Well, is that very significant? If yes, at all, then forget about the toast nonsense.

Jackie Danicki chips in with a telling anecdote in the comment section of that post:

I witnessed a discussion today in New York between a reporter for CNN, a reporter for Fox News, a reporter/anchor for NBC, and a producer for NBC - moderated by a veteran blogger whose wife happens to be Iranian. The blogger, Robert Scoble, had been taking CNN to task all weekend over their lack of coverage of the Iranian situation, and he and his wife were getting accurate reports (later confirmed by her family) via Twitter.

At the end of the panel - in which the mainstream media people all held their hands up and said that informed Twitter users were beating them at their own game - the CNN guy said, “Well, but if we weren’t doing our jobs, you guys would have nothing to link to. If we disappeared, so would a lot of Twitter content.” The moderator, not missing a beat, replied: “But you DID disappear last weekend, and Twitter filled the gap.” The CNN guy had to concede, and the comment was met with much applause.

Never underestimate the value of any tool which can help people to find solace in one another - like the samizdat during communist rule - let alone pass information which is important. I’m not sure why anyone would object to interest being taken in such a matter, apart from perhaps a general fatigue with all that is good in life. Too bad, so sad for them. :)

Update 19.06.2009, 14:30 CET: Just discovered this post on why journalists write so much rubbish about Twitter via Strange Corante, which explores a different line of reasoning.

The depressing reality of reporting on drugs policy: when years, even decades go by, with little or no change

This week Norwegian parliamentarians voted in favour of making a trial scheme of drug-injection facilities permanent. I find it deeply troubling that I could easily have published an article I wrote about the matter in 2005 without any alternations - save perhaps a new intro and omitting a line or two.

As a testament to how little has changed over the years, I will publish it here. Of course, in the scheme of things, three-four years is nothing, especially not compared to the heroin trials the Norwegian government has recently been considering – more than a decade after they were introduced on the continent.

In fact, the last time I talked to contacts working with drug treatment in the UK (2007), they said the debate had all moved on from heroin to subutex in drug replacement treatment, but what do I know... I’ve covered drugs policy on and off since 1995, and wrote my MA project on heroin prescriptions (2001), but this feeling that the story keeps repeating itself is part of why I couldn’t bear to report on it day to day. Not that there ever was a career to be made in being a drugs reporter, as Phillip Knightley pointed out when I spoke to him for my thesis, but, oh well, here’s that 2005 story:

The UN's narcotics control board scolds Norway for setting up a trial drug-injection facility in the country's capital, Oslo, claiming it will boost the use of illicit drugs.

In its annual report for 2005, The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the quasi-judicial control organ monitoring the implementation of the United Nations drug control conventions, reiterates is position that drug injection rooms "violate the provisions of the international drug control treaties" and urges the Norwegian Government "to take immediate and necessary action to ensure full compliance" with these.

So far, Norway has chosen to ignore the INCB, and in that decision the country joins ranks with Canada, Portugal, Spain, Holland, Germany and Switzerland. The three latter countries have run drug injection centres as part of larger policy schemes, aimed at reducing harm to society and individuals, since the late eighties.

In 1995 I attended a conference where the then head of the Drugs Authority in Frankfurt, Germany, Werner Schneider, described the city's drug scene before it adopted harm reduction measures such as injection rooms thus: "The misery was beyond words. In Tanuslage [the city's needle park] people literally died before our eyes and infections spread like fire in dry grass. In 1985 more than 60 per cent of the drug addicts that died in Frankfurt had HIV."

"In 1986 – 87 a very tiny methadone project was started in Frankfurt in response to the explosion of HIV and Aids. Frankfurt is a city of commuters. One million people work here every day, but only 650,000 live here. A lot of commuters would go to prostitutes before they went home, thereby introducing HIV into their families. The methadone project was started to protect normal family life, " said Jürgen Weimer, who was in charge of the low threshold services with the Frankfurt Drugs Authority, when I visited in 2001.

The 'success' of the drug injection rooms that have popped up all over Europe during the last few decades, lies in the fact that they've managed to bring down the number of HIV infections and reduce the number of deaths from overdoses. The 'victory' of these facilities is that they help keep the addicts alive and relatively healthy.

Only in 2002 Oslo was described as the drug deaths capital of Europe, after the Council of Europe's Pompidou centre found that the country topped the continent's statistics of number of drug deaths relative to population. Despite some reduction from the 'record' year 2001, a strong injection culture, prevalence of dangerous drugs cocktails, mixing heroin with rohypnol and amphetamine, and relative affordability of heroin has kept the number of drug overdoses and infections relative to population in Oslo high.

This explains why, 20 years after the Liverpool project first championed harm reduction measures such as injection rooms, needle exchange and drug prescriptions, Oslo, in a sharp departure from Norway's strong prohibitionist line, finally opened its first injection room in 2005, despite massive national opposition. And has decided to stick with it, even in the face of UN condemnation – at least for the time being.

It's too early yet to say if Oslo's injection room will contribute to reduce drug overdoses and infections in the same way as in the other countries that have set up such facilities. The drug addicts I talk to in Oslo say it restores some sense of dignity to an undignified life. But herein lies some of the danger of injection rooms as well: addicts I have talked to in such facilities on the continent say that while the injection rooms take away the stress and enables people to inject in a safe, clean environment, they are also a bit counter-productive in that they tie the drug users closer together and make it more difficult to get away from the drug scene.

In some injection rooms on the continent, services include not only free needles and supervision, but also free condoms and free, constantly updated, leaflets for prostitutes with vivid descriptions of violent and abusive customers to stay away from – everything to help the individual to stay alive.

It's a harsh and grim reality you would not wish on your worst enemy. I would like to be able to say here that all my research has showed me that injection rooms and other harm reduction measures have eradicated all the harm caused by drug abuse both to the individual and to society. I cannot. To paraphrase one of my sources these measures "do not eradicate any evils, but they do substantially reduce them, that's why we call it harm reduction, not harm eradication." END.

In its latest annual report from 2008, INCB is still criticising Norway for running drug-injection facilities. Interestingly, it notes that “in the evaluation of a project to establish a drug-injection room in Norway there is no evidence the scheme has resulted in a reduction in drug overdose rates or fatalities”. I wonder, why is that? And if there are no positive results to refer to in Norway, why was the trial act made permanent law? I seem to recall that results from injection rooms in Germany, Switzerland, Liverpool were unequivocally positive (though I am aware there are some doubts surrounding the methodology used to measure results in the Liverpool project).

In either case, to paraphrase the title of my old MA dissertation: it’s not a neat picture, neither is it black and white, and I when looking at media's drugs coverage I'm far too often reminded of ex-BBC director John Birt’s phrase about media’s bias against understanding....

The Law of Negotiated Misery Revisited

This piece over at journalism.co.uk on rookie freelance mistakes reminded me of my friend Brian's brilliant Law of Negotiated Misery, which asserts that the "self-managed classes" have a way of negotiating themselves into lives of permanent misery.

It's conclusion: if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate (read the full argument here). Interestingly, I recently talked to someone who said he always charged too much for talking gigs he was contacted for because when they'd paid that much people never dared to call it a bad talk. Funny how that thought never occurred to me.

Hurray, seems I get to continue reading those Press Gazette blogs after all

At least I hope today's news about Press Gazette being saved after a buyout by New Statesman owner Progressive Media (via Journalism.co.uk), implies that  I will be able to continue following those blogs. I'm also, of course, happy for the staff who get to stay on. I will however not take out a subscription for the print magazine because I'm a rather poor journalist myself; it's ancient news before it reaches these foreign shores and Roy Greenslade's explanation of the abrrevation Pdf as equalling Pretty Damn Futile brilliantly sums up my view on Pdf. Actually, I don't think I can remember when I last read a print magazine - books and newspapers, yes, mostly over the weekend - but magazines? It must have been some issue of Economist, perhaps the New Year one, I picked up for a flight...

Update 11:45 CET: and, of course, I was just reminded that Jon Slattery predicted PG might be rescued from its deathbed.

"The depressing but inevitable demise of Press Gazette"

Today, Wilmington Media announced that Press Gazette, the UK’s journalism trade mag, will be closing.

In a statement this lunchtime, proprietors Wilmington Group announced that next month's edition of the magazine would be the last hard copy edition, reports Holdthefrontpage. Dave Lee, from whom I, stuck for time as I'm in the middle of a few other stories, have stolen the title and intro, has more. I will only add that hiring Martin Stabe back in 2006 or so was a brilliant move and what got me reading Press Gazette's online in the first place (keeping in mind that I only know Martin via his blog, which I stumbled across via a former tutor, Andrew Grant-Adamson's, blog).

On a less positive note, a key industry player recently told me he felt former PG-man Jon Slattery's blog was at times doing a better job of covering the media industry than PG these days as Slattery was calling people up to get tidbits rather than just reproducing press releases - a fact I mention only because it's a trap too many news sites seem to fall in these days.

I will also add to Dave's thoughts on Media Guardian playing such a dominant role in the UK's media journalism market that there are aspects of that I find a bit odd: I would for instance have expected FT to cover especially the European media market better, and yet they're beaten again and again by Media Guardian - even on M&As and company results, issues where FT long has been heralded for having the market leading coverage. That said, The Independent also has good media stories from time to time, though they tend to "hide" them in the business section, and The Telegraph has been doing a better job of covering the media industry since they hired Amanda Andrews (or since they set up a seperate RSS-feed for media and technology, not sure which). I also get many of my favourite UK media tidbits from Journalism.co.uk, Paid Content and media bloggers.

On that note, if not even an online shred of Press Gazette will be kept alive, I shall thoroughly miss Peter Kirwan's blog - even though I was not entirely happy about a piece he interviewed me about Mecom for, I've come to really enjoy his writings on Media Money as it covers one of my favorite aspects of the media industry so well. 

For the record: of the sites mentioned here, I've been paid for article commissions from Press Gazett, The Independent business section and I'm a regular contributor to Journalism.co.uk (and, if I shall be really strict on disclosures, I've also been paid for articles I wrote for The Guardian/Observer)

Update 07.04-09, 13:00 CET: On this topic I also enjoyed reading Press Gazette Insider’s View: Why Journalism’s Trade Bible Failed by Patrick Smith 16:55 CET: and Jon Slattery's Old Bell tolls for Press Gazette via Thoughts of Nigel

17:07 CET: isn't it interesting how many people, like here, say they will miss the blogs? I singled out Media Money above, but I shall miss the other blogs too.

Norwegian press saves money by abandoning all attempts at serious reporting on April Fool's Day

'The financial crisis is forcing media to implement unusual cost cutting measures,' the female leader for the country's journalist union has admitted to The Norwegian Office of Enlightenment after the blog's investigations revealed all yesterday's Norwegian newspaper stories to be April Fool's Day's spoofs (via Sonitus) (in Norwegian).

 "This year, all Norwegian newspapers have joined forces to support this model to save our jobs. These are turbulent times and many fear for their jobs, especially the former horse riding news boys who were retrained as ink stirrers, retrained again as printers, reschooled to be scanners, then retrained as culture editors and now preparing to reschool yet again to become Twitter surveillors," the union boss, quoted under a bogus name, says in what must be my favourite April Fool's Day story this year.

At this stage I should probably admit, that in all my single-mindedness, I was planning to use 1. April to speculate about Metro International's mystery bidder and report that the real reason for Peter Chernin's fallout with Rupert Murdoch was how the latter's insatiable appetite for print led him to court the world's largest freesheet publisher, or that the desperate times on Iceland led the archrivals Jon Asgeir Johannesson and Björgolfur Gudmundsson to join forces, team up with the latter's old Russian business associates, and submit a proposal to buy Metro from 1 krone (roughly 10 pence) under which conditions the new company would take over all liabilities and move the headquarters to St Petersburg where Jon Asgeir had sought exile and Putin had vowed to protect him from his debtors granted Metro would expose the anti-Russian bias of Western Press. The Icelandic deal would mean Frettabladid would become Metro Iceland, and Jon Asgeir was also rumoured to look into launching a new range of Russian supermarkets called Бонус.

Or, or, or...but lost between meetings, the lack of superimposed deadlines and an inability to make up my mind about which scenario to put forward, which might have been good seeing how all of the scenarios I had in my mind would only be bordering on funny if you were intimately familiar with this particular part of the media industry, it never happened.

So, big fail on my account there, which brings me back to the Norwegian Office of Enlightenment's spoof (somehow that name reminds me of the Enlightened Tobacco Company which once produced Death and Death Light, the slower death, cigarettes): great stuff (any awkwardness in the translation is down to me and lack of time as I'm preparing for ... another meeting:-) )

A blogging-journalist hero for Ada Lovelace Day

Danish IT-journalist Dorte Toft used her blog to help reveal one of the country’s biggest business scandals in modern time. It won her both acclaim and criticism.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and, answering UK software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson’s call, over 1,500 blogger worldwide have pledged to write about a woman in tech they admire. As I believe we sorely need new journalistic heroes and new myths that better illustrate the opportunities offered by our rapidly changing media landscape, I thought I would take this opportunity to put forward one such hero: programmer turned blogger-journalist Dorte Toft. Full story over at Journalism.co.uk

I find it unbelievable that editors felt the need to emphasis that blogging doesn't replace journalism and warn of using blogs as a journalistic tool (in Danish) after Toft helped flush out the skeletons in the closet at IT Factory. Toft's work is a great example of both beat blogging and using a blog to do investigative research. It also reveals some of the major flaws in journalism today, and I have a feeling I shall return with some more thoughts on this story, an ALD09 post for Ada Lovelace Day, later. However, I really wanted to use my own blog to force myself to write an ALD09 post about a late mentor of mine.

Freesheets may be in the frontline trenches of this war, but it's only the tip of the iceberg

Yes, freesheets are challenged, but that's down to the collapse in the print classifieds market, and Mecom is hardly the best example of a company brought down by its frees.

In an article yesterday, The Financial Times (FT) suggested the freesheet model could be the first victim of the current newspaper crisis. Now, I'm not sure if I should have a go at FT or Trinity Mirror CEO Sly Bailey here, but this article elegantly skirts around the newspaper industry's bigger, structural problem, and some of its facts are at best misleading.

Freesheets hardly at the heart of Mecom's problems
"...Companies with the most serious threats to their existence have a strong element of free newspapers in their portfolio," the FT article says - and cites Mecom as its first example. This smacks of lazy reporting. The key problem for the pan-European newspaper group headed by former Mirror boss David Montgomery is high gearing or leverage. In short: scooping up too much, too fast at the top end of the economic cycle, using borrowed money to facilitate its acquisition spree. That, combined with operating in a sector which is both cyclically and structurally challenged, makes it the perfect example of the kind of company whose shares are receiving the worst hammering in the current downturn.

Of course the downturn in the advertisement market is hitting Mecom like all other newspaper companies, but I'm not convinced Mecom is the best example of a company brought down by its frees. If you're not familiar how much of its business is made up of freesheets, here's a quick run down:

Mecom's freesheet portfolio
In Denmark, Mecom rushed out a new short-lived freesheet, Dato, at the start of the Danish freesheet war in 2006 - but as this closed in 2007, it shouldn't affect Mecom's 2008 financial results - and still has the loss making youth-oriented free Urban in its portfolio, which recently reduced its circulation to 203,000, but has merged all its content production. In Norway, the British based company has a small network of non-daily frees in Oslo; in Poland, it has Moje Miasto running on a similar model to the Norwegian frees - which leaves The Netherlands, where free newspapers comprises the biggest part of the British based company's operation. Every week its Dutch divison publishes about 8.6 million copies of free door-to-door distributed papers in addition to seven paid for titles.

However, in contrast to UK newspapers, Mecom also has remarkably high subscription rates for most of its paid for papers which must be of some comfort amid all the current advertisement gloom. From what the British company has indicated about its 2008 earnings so far, it seems Mecom is worst affected by the advertisement decline, not in The Netherlands but in Denmark and hardly at all in Poland (I'm omitting Mecom Germany here as it's not big on frees and practically sold - just need the shareholders to approve the sales agreement).

A more disturbing case
Now, it is true that companies with a strong element of free are struggling - it will certainly be interesting to see how Metro International, the world's biggest publisher of freesheets will fare in the times ahead - but rather than Mecom, I would have used Norwegian-based Schibsted as an example here.

Not only because, in contrast to Mecom, it's a market leading freesheet publisher in several big markets, such as Spain, France and Sweden (the latter in partnership with Metro) and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe, but because it illustrates the larger, structural problem at work so much better. In a way, Schibsted is also a much more disconcerting example.

It's freesheets, especially in places like Spain where the property market is in a dire state, are being hammered, but that's also happening to Aftenposten, Norway's newspaper of record, a daily paid for national newspaper which traditionally has relied heavily on print classifieds.

That I believe, is the bigger problem qua business models here, at least in my part of the world: we're seeing the market for print classifieds emigrate online and not necessarily to online newspapers. In contrast, Schibsted's other national Norwegian print newspaper, Verdens Gang (VG), which gets its ad revenues from brand advertisement rather than classifieds, has not, at least until new year, done as bad as Aftenposten (though if we're talking circulation decline, the relationship is reverse).

So yes, frees may be head of the queue, or "in the frontline trenches of the war," as Baily says to FT, but national and big regional dailies relying heavily on print classifieds make a good number two. And that's still only part of the story, I'll return to why I think Schibsted is such a disconcerting example in a separate post a bit later.

How to give value even to the expert reader when rehashing an old story

I was intrigued to see some of my tidbits from my reporting trip to Iceland dance into the latter part of this story in The Independent last month.

Now, I'm fully aware what a confounding place the internet can be, indeed the world is full of people who will eagerly tell you that, just like Iceland, the World Wide Web is a nobody-knows-who-owns-what-kind-of-place. Nor am I foolish enough to believe I own the facts, it would be a sad testament to my reporting if nobody found use for it or found it interesting enough to repeat.

My bigger argument here is the lack of links, this silly pretence of exclusivity. As an increasing amount of people spend an ever increasing amount of their time online, where linking to your sources is common practice everywhere except in certain newspapers with online editions, this practice of omitting links to sources comes across as increasingly bizarre and dishonest - as Judith also pointed out a while back.

This particular article is a great example of an aggregated story: for those who've followed the story the only thing that's new here are the sound bites, though even they cover old territory. However, it's safe to assume it's new for a large portion of The Independent's audience.

But adding links would have meant that even the more than usually interested and informed readers could have found value in the article by being able to go to the sources. Yes, I have a vested interest here, but it's not only that parts of the story sounds like it comes from my hands: here's a story I'm genuinely in interested in, and by providing links to her sources the journalist could provide me, the expert reader, with value.

I don't think there's anything wrong with aggregating a story, it can be an excellent way of giving value to your readers, but by not linking in today's transparent world you just come across as disingenuous, certainly to readers who have a bit more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject at hand. And frequently, because British newspapers are serving an international audience, readers do have more than rudimentary knowledge of such issues. Certainly, with the staggering loss of faith in Icelandic media, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the Icelandic turned to international media for news on Baugur, Landsbanki etc.

Now, for the record I should say that I really like The Independent's Business section, where this story appeared. I have enjoyed much of its Baugur coverage. Besides, in my book, the newspaper frequently hides its best media stories there. That might reveal my own preferences of course, I'd take media M&As and -financial results, over celebrity news any old day - but it's still one of my favourite business sections. Also, I'm fully aware that linking policies often are beyond the individual journalist's, and even editor's, control, this was just such a good example of how news sites can serve their readers so much better by linking to their sources.

Update 14:20 CET: Bonus link,"Why won't news sites link" from Tim Windsor/Nieman Journalism Lab via @nedregotten on Twitter.

Why we need the link manifesto more than ever

I was astonished to read  Newspapers: don't link to us yesterday, I really thought newspapers, several of those mentioned keen to come across as web-savy, had moved on from such selfdestructive policies.

It's a reminder that we still need the excellent Link Manifesto penned by The Danish Online News Association (DONA) to be spread far and wide. I wrote about it for Journalism.co.uk and blogged about it over at Wired Journalists - where Paul Balcerak said he thought it should be on the wall of every newsroom, and I agree of course - but I don't think I've blogged about it here, so here goes:

First law: We link to the sources for the data we use in our journalistic products. If we have read, seen or heard important new information on an external site - for instance about companies, people or surveys - we will link to it.

Second law: We link directly and precisely to the information we use from external sites. In this way we provide proper service to our readers rather than just linking to the front page of the external site.

Third law: We are precise in our information about where a link leads to; about who has produced the information we link to and when. The readers should know where it takes them when they follow a link.

Fourth law: We recognise that an article consisting of precise links to information that represents different angles on an issue is a journalistic product.

Fifth law: We are open to inbound links to our own news sites because we want to be an integrated part of the web’s ecosystem

Sixth law: We aspire to making it easier to link directly to our articles.

For the record I should mention that I, with the help of other online enthusiasts, founded The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) in December. I would appreciate your help with spreading this manifesto far and wide. When it was first launched, its authors, Kim Elmose and Lars K. Jensen, encouraged news rooms everywhere to write their own link commandments and use their manifesto freely.

Update 14:36 CET: I must admit I initially failed to see the post on Newspapers: don't link to us over at OnlineJournalismBlog was not written by the blog's owner, Paul Bradshaw, but have amended it now. Also, I'm delighted to see that the post by Malcolm Coles has resulted in some immediate changes and a new post naming more sites banning inbound direct links.  

Update 18-03/09 16:00 CET: And if there's anyone out there still thinking linking's not good for you, that linking out doesn't make sense even in today's web economy, here, as I tweeted the other day, is a maths formula that proves them wrong.

Advice for the jobless hack

Amid the current deluge of news about media layoffs I was deligheted to find Steve Smith back blogging, and that with some good advice to journalists and editors recently made redundant.

Now, Steve - the former editor of Spokesman Review who resigned in protest against a new round of job cuts last fall after six years editing the American regional - has been blogging privately for some months now, and, since I've kept in touch with him via Facebook, it's a bad testament to how little time I spend there that I only discovered this recently.

But be that as it may, if any of you enjoyed News is a Conversation, the blog Steve wrote while at Spokesman, and like me didn't know of his personal blog, the conversation continues over at Still a Newspaper Man - so named after this moving ode he wrote last July.

For my own part, I met Steve when covering a lecture he gave in Oslo 2007 on the transparency projects he famously pioneered at Spokesman, such as webcasting editorial meetings (in Norwegian), and have enjoyed his blog posts, where he frequently combines his experiences from 36 years in journalism with a genuine understanding of how the news industry needs to change to survive, ever since.

Or as he told me in Oslo: "It's the journalism that counts, not the medium. Preserving the medium is a false desire. All you can preserve is the journalism and the value to the community you serve." But I digress, I was going to blog about his advice to jobless hacks.

His very first bit of advice is to stop reading the industry news wires and blogs as the news is too discouraging.

Might be a bit detrimental to my own blog if you were to follow up on that, but I promise I'll be posting some more optimistic stuff here soon (in the meantime, if you're fluent in Scandinavian languages, my efforts to create a forum for online journalists, -developers and -enthusiasts last year led to founding The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA) and our blog is mostly focused on innovation, inspiration and online tools).

But back to Steve's advice for the jobless, do read the full post here, I especially liked his conclusion: 

A layoff is a great equalizer. An unemployed editor is as much out of work as the laid off receptionist. All of us have our issues, our reduced expectations, our fears. But we are not defined by our unemployment. We are defined by the work we have done and the work we will do again. We are defined by our values and our commitment to craft. Having been there, I know there is light somewhere ahead. In the end, our commitment and our optimism will see us through.

And, as always, the blog comments offer many gems, including this from David Elton: "Steve, I am begging you. You have some cash in the bank. Your wife is supertalented. Take 4 months and write a darn book about how too few editors have genitalia these days. It takes balls to do what you did and it benefitted our city here in Spokane..."

Also, check out "Laid off? 10 tips for recently unemployed journalists" by Mark Potts and "If you're laid off, here's how to socially network" by Scobleizer