Kristine Lowe

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

Free our data (chapter xxx)

Bente Kalsnes has an interesting post on the problems with "free" public data in Norway, which is often very far from free.

She describes an environmental web project she was involved with for local newspaper group Edda Media: it stranded on a combination of lack of a coherent format for the data in question (ex. xml), the public institutions' lack of experience/willingness to cooperate with external partners and the worsened financial outlook.

It's a pity the project stranded, or was postponed until further notice rather, because it sounds like one that would have added great value to the local news sites and communities in question.

It's yet another example of how difficult it can be for newspapers to make structured use of public data in Norway, another aspect being how "it is a problem, especially for local newspapers, that public institutions often charge big fees for this information which has been gathered on behalf of the public, using the taxpayers money,” as Espen Andersen pointed out in this interview.

To be or not to be Wilhelm

Getting the name right can be difficult, especially when it has 16 - or wait, 15 - parts. The story on how German press was led astray by a Wikipedia prankster yesterday, illustrates perfectly the pitfalls of modern fact-checking and Wikipedia dependency... full story over at Olav Anders' blog.

What I've been reading and pondering of late

Obviously, this is not a complete list. Usually I just save my favourite links to delicious, but, since this blog revolves around the many facets of how the communcations industry is changing, here's a few really interesting links to chew on:

Eirikso: "Free, but not that free…" Eirik Solheim's contribution to the blograce leading up to Wednesday's Media Evolution 2009 where they're dicussing Chris Anderson's thought on the economics of free.

Mediainfluencer: "Brand as identity and branding as behaviour", excellent as always from Adriana on branding and its role in business strategy. "..the bad news for the branding folks is that messages and projections are not what they used to be. The good news is that a company can define its identity and behave according to who they want to be. That sounds like a good trade-off to me."

Richard Burton: Is Fleet Street a Dead End or the New Super Highway? The former editor of the Daily Telegraph online, now managing editor of The JC, on the challenges of getting the Telegraph to embrace the online mindset and opportunities, and on the media future. Richard warned me this was a transcript and as such not entirely accurate, but that the general gist was correct. It does make for fascinating reading (I may still find time to post some of my thoughts on it later).

Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents
Not so much a link to ponder perhaps, but still an interesting development: Reporters Without Borders has published a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents (pdf, 81 p.), intended for citizen reporters in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. According to Gisle Hannemyr, it provides some rudimentary technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and how to get around certain types of censorship.

Hudson River crash reveals Twitter in league of its own for breaking news

For my part, the story of the plane that crashed into Hudson River started with this message on Twitter:

@BreakingNewsOn is checking on reports that a plane has crashed in the Bronx, New York. More to come.

More messages from @BreakingNewsOn, several others chip in, incl @davewiner and @HAX. I go upstairs, turn on the TV (about 15min after the story broke now): NOTHING. Web: nothing on the frontpage of Nettavisen.no, NRK or BBC; - NRK headline story is former prime minister Kåre Willoch: "Eg angrar ikkje" (Je ne regrette rien), a storm in a teacup if you ask me - but CNN has the goods. Good, very moving web-TV.

I go downstairs again and find a cacaphony of people informing each other on Twitter; sharing tidbits of what's happening and who's twittering, who's goot footage and snapshots, including these amazing pictures. At this point NRK.no has the plane crash story, but still not as top story - Willoch still rules the evening (FAIL).

And no, I'm not trying to break any news with this post, for that it is much too late: both for this particular news story and when it comes to Twitter's record for being the first place to look for breaking news stories - this is just a snapshot of how I got the news, recorded as much for myself as anyone else. 

A few comments from the Twittersphere :

@kevglobal Still "don't get" Twitter? Enter "Hudson" or "Airways" into http://search.twitter.com/ right now. Brace for bad news; plane crash

@webbmedia Twitteverse, Twitpic, excellent job! I'm amazed at how much information I learned so quickly...While waiting AT AN AIRPORT!

Update 16/1, 11:24 CET: just remembered that I removed the Twitter widget from this blog recently due to a security bug, but you'll find me twittering here: @KristineLowe

My favourite reporting trips of the year

I had a zillion posts I wanted to blog this Christmas, but soon found I was in more of a contemplative mood once I got through all of the family business.

So, inspired by Lloyd I thought I'd sum up the year, if not month-by-month in pictures, at least with pictures from my favourite reporting trips this year.

Now, those who know me well might notice that I've included almost all my major trips out of town this year - save Skup in Tönsberg (we were travelling with a professional photograper) and London in February (had great talks with Adam, Richard, Per Mikael Jensen, got to work in what is now Alistair Heath's office, saw the insides of Google HQ London, attended a VRM meeting, met Doc Searls - but a spell of flu clouded my judgement and I only uploaded a few pics to the walled garden that is Facebook)- but they will also recognise this is the change addict/adventurer in me speaking (I'd say the only thing that makes living in Norway tolerable is going abroad every so often, and, as it so happens, I've seen precious little of Norway, so this year's opportunities to see more of the country has also been adventures of sorts).

Nordic Media Festival - Bergen

 

Save from the pictures from the price cermony, which are copyrighted, I came home from this festival with an awful lot of pictures of men in suits.

World Association of Newspapers' (WAN) Congress/ World Editors Forum (WEF) - Gothenburg

Interesting conference, foremostly for the great conversations I had after hours. A few pictures from Timothy Balding's talk on the glorious state of the newspaper industry here, and from the party here (I wrote a blog post from this memorable evening as well). But my favourite photo from the event - not for its technical brilliance, but for its expressiveness - is Reuter's Ilicco Elia explaining how mobile phones may be used for "pocket journalism" (this photo is copyrighted to Journalisten.no):

Kvinesdal Emigration Festival 2008

 

I took some 200 photos during my exotic weekend in Kvinesdal in July - where I covered the annual emigration festival for Viking Magazine (published by Sons of Norway, US) - and have uploaded some of them to Flickr, including pics of Hanne Krogh, Secret Garden, Bjøro Haaland and Ted Fosberg (more to follow in January).

The Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) 2008 - Lillehammer

 

Turned out investigative journalists make pretty decent musicians, or as Jude said: there might even be a correlation between investigative skills and musical talent. You can see the slideshow of my more informal pictures from the event here ( click on the photos for subtitles ).

Reykjavik (December)

 

A very sombre end to the year in Reykjavik, where I was parachuted off to do a story on how the financial crisis has affected Icelandic media (the Norwegian stories from that trip are here and here). I worked with a very competent photographer for the trip, Haldur Jonasson, formerly of both Nyhedsavisen and Frettabladid + haphazardly snapped a few photos myself (the one here and a few more at Flickr) - though I wish I'd had more time to explore the place with my camera. Everyone I met there were extremly accomodating and helpful, but in terms of the state of the media it was surreal: nobody seemed to know who actually owned the newspapers they worked for, everything was in a state of flux. 

Why change in the newsroom is so hard

While we're on the issue of change, and how difficult it is for media organisations, I also wanted to highlight some brilliant insights buried in a link towards the end of my last post.

It has always been a puzzle to me why journalists of all people seem to be so opposed to change, so conservative when it comes to embracing new technology and tools, as most career advisers will tell you that if you want to make a career in journalism, you need to be flexible and enjoy working in dynamic, fast-changing environments. It was certainly my impression from what I was told that you needed to be a bit of a change addict - which suited me just fine. But the reality is not that simple, and Carrie Lisa Brown really puts her finger on some of the dynamics at work (do check out the full post):

...The journalism blogosphere is full of frustrated rants about various ways in which individual resistance is one of the biggest impediments to change (and believe me, I too have been one of the frustrated). Even in individual newsrooms, some people are tagged as those who will embrace change readily and will as thus be relied on heavily to step up (and keep stepping until they are nearly burnt out) to contribute in a variety of ways to adapting to the digital world; others just are dim-witted and must be worked around. Not incidentially, from a psychological perspective, this allows many in leadership roles to bump up their own status as ones who are savvy enough to “get it” while simultaneously giving them a scapegoat for lack of progress — those “other folks” who just don’t and never will...

...The truth is, the more time you spend with individual journalists listening — really listening — to their ideas about their role in the future — lo and behold, you find people who are smart enough to have read the writing on the wall and have actually thought quite creatively about how their particular skills apply well in an online world...

...What’s holding these folks back is not so much individual failings, but systems. Newspapers are still putting out a print product every day, and the routines that make it possible for them to manage chaos and produce the daily miracle on dead trees each morning are notoriously hard to change partly just because they do WORK to make that possible....

The crowdsourced journalism lecture

Great stuff from Robin Hamman: in preparation for his first day teaching on the MA International Journalism programme at City University, he asked his twitter and facebook followers to help him come up with an outline for the lecture. Here's the results from twitter. Makes me feel rather envious of this year's class of students (I graduated from the same course in 2002).