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...

Friday Caption Contest

Actually, it's more of an excuse to publish a photo I snapped a while back and rather like. It's of a statue of the legendary naval officer Tordenskjold (also spelled Tordenskiold, in english "Thundershield"), and there's an interesting idiom related to this guy (see below the photo):

I quite like the phrase Tordenskiolds soldater (the soldiers of Tordenskiold), meaning that it is the same people you see everywhere: in the media and as boardmembers of companies, associations etc.

The phrase comes from Tordenskiold's siege of Karlsten-Marstrand, when Tordenskiold invited the commander of the fortress to inspect his troops which were lined up in the city streets below the fortress. The commander went through all the streets in town and everywhere he saw soldiers lined up. He realised that he did not have a chance against Tordenskiold, so he decided to surrender under the condition that all his troops were allowed to leave the fortress unharmed. In reality, as soon as the Swedish commander had inspected them, Tordenskiold's soldiers ran around the corner and lined up in another street where the commander then inspected the same troop for the second or third time (I've heared several different versions of this story, but all relate how Tordenskiold tricked the Swedes by making them believe his troop was much bigger than what was the case).

Opening hours for newspaper comments

How would you feel if I were to say the opening hours for commenting on this blog's posts are from 9am to 3pm?

Recently I came across a link to this screengrab from Norwegian news site Agderposten.no (via @prinsessemarte ), stating that a given article was open for comments between 7am and 9pm. The wording here sounds a bit strange to me, but as far as I know "opening hours" for commenting on newspaper articles are not so uncommon - though this is not always stated so explicity, and is often phrased differently.

Because news sites have editorial responsibility for libellous comments, they have to be moderated pre or post publication, and many news sites will moderate comments continuously during daytime while all comments submitted at night, say between 9-10pm and 7-8am, will be held in a queue until the moderators pick up their job and start approving them in the morning. This for the simple reason that people are more likely to drink and sumbit comments that are libellous, hateful or incoherent during night time (and this is not just a theoretical possibility, from what I've seen at news sites I've worked I suspect the majority of comments submitted during night time are libellous, hateful or incoherent). Personally, I know I have a habit of talking about the social web as a virtual pub, in which context the term opening hours actually makes sense - though I'm not sure how far I should try to stretch that metaphore, certainly people tend to behave very differently in the comment sections of major news sites than what they do on the world wide web at large...

Getting rid of Montgomery worked few wonders for the soon-to-close Netzeitung

M. DuMont Schauberg (MDS) proved to be no saviour for Netzeitung, the German online only newspaper started in 2000 by the same company that launched Norwegian online newspaper Nettavisen in 1996.

Employees at was was once Mecom Germany were some of the most vocal opponents of Mecom and its boss, David Montgomery, and much was made of how the company would return to German ownership when the British company's German arm was acquired by MDS early this year. Alas, MDS proved to be no knight in shining armour for Netzeitung. Friday it was announced the pioneering online newspaper will close at the end of the year (article from yesterday, in German, via Piet Bakker on Twitter). Olav Anders Övrebö, who worked at Netzeitung in its early days, has more here and here.

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).

Could I have my RSS as I take my coffee, please? (or why I missed that Telegraph story)

I take my coffee straight: it's one of those instant fixes I'm rather dependent on having available whenever I need it, which, seeing that I work for clients in very different time zones, can be at any hour of the day or night. I do wish those RSS-feeds I'm interested in was available the same way.

Actually, they might very well be: I could have created something a lot more tailor-made than just using a newsreader (still on Bloglines, though I know I should switch) to subscribe to news- and blog feeds on media/tech/business and keywords, but why won't media companies make it easier to find their stories?

Take The Times for instance: they have a good media editor, but no media feed the last time I checked (a while ago. NB: see update below). Or the fact that The Telegraph published a story on David Oddson last night, but didn't bother tagging it as "media", at least it wasn't in my Telegraph media feed this morning, so I only discovered their article by checking my RSS-feed from Roy Greenslade after I'd published my own post on this (I first found the story on Icelandreview after someone googled Morgunbladid and ended up on my blog , which made me do the same to see what was up - Icelandic media being something I've followed for several years).

Actually, I know how easy it is in some CMSs, like Escenic, to not put a story in all the categories it should be in, and I'm also aware that, with Twitter, many people have moved away from using RSS alltogether. I still use it though, in addition to Twitter, to find stories: I still think RSS is the best way to find stories proactively online and to get a good overview of what's being written - and either my newsreader has a major problem, or media companies mess up their feeds all the time. There was a week+ this summer my subscription threw up no stories from The Media Guardian - like, I actually had to visit the site, there's not many sites I'd do that for, to get updates;-) - and I've also had the same problem with The Telegraph's muddled media section (muddled because they mix media with telecoms, cable and wireless).

Also, I no longer get the Observer's media feed until Monday, or sometimes Tuesday, whereas I used to get it just after midnight on Sundays (back when "web first" was a pioneering idea?). And this whole idea of mixing the feed of Sunday business sections with the rest of the week, as at least the Indy and Observer do, seems very odd to me as Sunday newspapers used to be something entirely different than weekday newspapers: different weekday business sections always carried much of the same stories regardless of the newspaper, so subcribing to them all feels close to redundant, whereas Sundays used to aspire to create their very own mix of background/analysis and stories they had chased up/uncovered themselves.

If that was still the case - and I'm not contesting that it is, but my perspective is muddled by relying on RSS only and me no longer living in London - I'd pay for the Sundays rather than the weekday papers. Mind you, I'm speaking only of the UK here, in places like Norway business news sites, such as Dagens Naeringsliv, have even been known to send their whole car sections into their media section feed.

Now, I know I should probably move on to create my own tailor-made feed via Yahoo Pipes or similar, but in these days, where paid content and the question of how news sites may successfully charge their readers, this strikes me as one thing that I, as and expert reader, might actually be willing to pay for: to get the news in my RSS-reader instantly - my experience with Yahoo Pipes is also that there's often a delay - and "unpolluted": only the real stuff, please (or, as a friend often puts it: why ruin perfectly good coffee with milk and sugar). Many news sites muddle their media feeds with other feeds, I assume to bring up the volume, but I'd much rather have e.g. media and technology as seperate feeds so I can prioritise better.

However, I'm very aware I belong to a minority of readers who these days only matter in the link economy. Also, I appologise if this post has been mired with household slang: it's one of those rants I usually censor myself from writing, but any input on how I should best set up my newsfeed would also be welcome. I'm not as much of a techie as I'd like to be though: I accomplish most things I bend my mind to, but my mind is frequently overstretched on the workday treadmill of incesscant deadlines...   

Update 01.10 16:30 CET: Joanna Geary kindly made sure The Times got a separate RSS-feed for its media section yesterday, and I quite forgot to update this post until now in the rush of everything. It has of course duly been added to my newsreader and to this new Twingly channel on journalism and media (in beta) I've been playing around with (I've started adding some of my favourite  UK and Scandinavian media feeds to it, leave a comment, email me or DM me on Twitter, I'm @KristineLowe, if you want an invite).

Iceland's most hated man appointed newspaper editor

Davíd Oddsson, Iceland's longest serving Prime Minister and until recently head of the Central Bank, has been hired to edit Morgunbladid, the country's newspaper of record.

I wonder if ever there was a better trick for loosing readers quickly. In the name of accuracy, it must be said that I am of course aware that there are many contenders for the title "Icleand's most hated man", but The Times has certainly singled Oddson out as possible number one in this respect. During my reporting trip to Rekjavik in December, Oddson, and then Prime Minister Geir Haarde, seemed to be the protesters' main objects of hatred, as this photo I snapped illustrates:

You'll find more of my photos from Iceland here, published under a CC non-commercial share-alike license, though I worked with an excellent photographer, Haldur Jonasson, while there, who took some top photos of Morgunbladid's offices and of former Morgunbladid editor Ólafur Th. Stephensen, who announced his resignation a week before Oddson was named one of two new editors of the daily paid-for newspaper.

Of course, Morgunbladid used to be controlled by none other than Bjørgolfur Gudmundsson, and its main rival, Frettabladid, by Baugur's Jon Asgeir Johannesson - cross-ownership and close ties between top politicians, businessmen and the media seems to have been the norm rather than the exception in Iceland - but one would have thought that financial meltdown and all that was reevealed in its wake had changed this.

Apparently not. One journalist I talked to likened the country's media to a bad soap opera; it seems we are are up for a whole new set of episodes.

The Icelandic Weather Report has more on the story.

 Source: googling "Morgunbladid" and finding Icelandreview's articles on the story, as linked up in this post, because someone else googled Morgunbladid and ended up on my blog.

Newspaper forced to put new subscribers on waiting list

On the face of it this sounds like a truly miraculous story amidst all the current  doom and gloom of the newspaper industry: Danish local Randers Amtsavis is unable to deal with the rush of new subscribers, reports Journalisten.dk.

Almost 2000 new subscribers since mid-July is forcing the paper to meet subscription requests with the following message: "We're sorry, we can't give you the newspaper straight away, but we can put you on a waiting list". However, the comments reveal that these are not really new subscribers, but rather old subscribers who left the paper in droves when it changed from being a morning to evening paper five months ago, and are now returning after the paper swapped back to being a morning newspaper (the move was announced early July and made effective as of 17 August). A remarkable story nonthesame.

In the comment section one reader asks why ever the Randers Amstavis thought it a good idea to become an evening paper, to which the paper's chief-editor replies they are not too boneheaded (my hasty translation of 'stivnakkede') to admit they made a mistake.

Where Murdoch leads, others follow: paid content here we go again

'One great gap separated the advocates or charging for online content from all others, and that was its lack of recognition, its lack of respectability in the eyes of the public, and even in the most advanced circles.'

Then, in April, Rupert Murdoch stepped forward and said readers dependence on free content had to change and, lo and behold, media executives from all over the place stepped forward to praise the virtues of paid content and unveil plans to start charging for online news. At least my newsreader was abuzz with news about media execs all of a sudden coming out as staunch defenders of paid content in all the markets I follow.

A bit like my newsreader has been abuzz this week, though now with reactions to Murdoch's announcement he plans to charge for all his news websites by next summer - most of them decidedly negative: he's mad, he's wrong, what on earth is he thinking, it can never work etc. I find I can't bring myself to get too excited about having that debate again (though I did love this comment by Adam and this post by Charlie Beckett ), so I'd rather just deal with the facts: it might not work, but it will happen. I think Murdoch-biographer Michael Wolff says it well in his comment:

...[Rupert] is going to do the thing he has always done: buck convention, offend sensibilities, and not pussyfoot around. "I believe that if we're successful, we'll be followed fast by other media,” Murdoch said yesterday—which has pretty much been his method of operation in the media business. By force of will and clarity of position, he defines the world.

Now, take Mecom for instance. In Denmark the pan-European media group headed by one of Murdoch's former henchmen, David Montgomery, is ready to roll out a system for micro-payments on its news sites as early as 1 September. The company's Danish CEO, Lisbeth Knudsen, promised they would only charge for unique content, not for general news, but said they were hoping to develope a system for charging for online content that could also be used in other Mecom  countries (in Danish). Of course, despite everything (correct me if I'm, wrong, but I seem to recall Montgomery and Murdoch had some kind of fall out) Montgomery lists Murdoch as the businessman he admires the most, but other media companies have voiced similar plans, so I think we'll see plenty of more paid content experiments in action soon ...

Will I pay? Slightly different debate. Basically, I'm all with what Chris Anderson said here. I'd pay for content I can't live without, but mainstream news site currently offer very little I can't. News Corp., for one, has very little, if any, content that is specialist enough for me, my primary focus being the European media market. Mecom's Danish flagship, Berlingske Tidende, has a pretty decent media section, so perhaps ... if cost cuts don't limit its output more than it already has...

( Oh, and I found the opening quote here, and only made some slight edits to it, after I - struck by how vogue paid content all of a sudden became with media execs - googled "coming out" )

Another Icelandic Media Baron Bites the Dust

Björgólfur Gudmundsson is not only a bank chief in hot water,as The Telegraph describes him today: with his bankruptcy an era in Icelandic media history comes to an end.

Now that both Jon Asgeir Johannessen's investment vehicle Baugur and Björgólfur, also the former owner of West Ham FC, have been declared bankrupt, Iceland's media moguls are officially dead. Between them they used to control most of the tiny island's media, including leading newspapers such as Fréttablaðið, Morgunbladid and DV.

"You know, the sugar daddy behind DV and Fréttablaðið was Baugur, but the sugar daddy behind Morgunbladid was Björgólfur Guðmundsson? Every media here has its problem. We had Jon Asgeir, they have Björgólfur," said Reynir Traustason, Editor-in-chief of DV, when I interviewed him during my reporting trip to Iceland in December last year.

"Our sugar daddies are all dead", he asserted, describing Icelandic media as "alcoholics on detox" (my feature on Ragnarok for Icelandic media ran as the lead story in Journalisten's December issue, and my story on the role online media played in the "fleece revolution for Journalism.co.uk can be found here). I also chronicled the Icelandic newspaper saga for IFRA Magazine last year, as the story is quite amazing.

When I interviewed Metro International's CEO Per Mikael Jensen about the company's Q2 results recently, I solicited questions on Twitter, and when I asked him if there ia a future for free newspapers in the economic downturn, given advertising is in decline - a question submitted by fellow freelance journalist Gwladys Fouché - he said those freesheet closures people referred to "that's those Icelandic guys". A bit rich given how Metro shocked the market by closing its entire Spanish operation in January, but you got to love how he phrased it:

"Remember the crazy guys from Iceland? There was a time there where all of them wanted to buy a football team or a newspaper," he said and remarked how Metro at least closed down Spain in a mature way (more on that here).

 

I'm reminded of these sculptures along the road to Keflavik Airport, some of which seemed to be close to falling down, but I have no idea what they actually represent (snapped from behind the bus window)

Metro International: fast becoming the McDonald's of newspaper companies?

Metro International divests Italian operation but enters into franchise agreement to maintain global advertisment reach.

I was going to call his post "Metro International shrinks further", but felt depressed about the prospect of writing yet another gloomy post on newspapers when it struck me that isn't  Metro International just taking one more step towards becoming the McDonald's of media companies? With new franchise agreements in place in the US, Portugal and Ecuador this year, other places last year, the world's largest publisher of free dailies seems to be moving steadily towards a franchise model akin to McDonald's: global brand, local franchises bearing the financial risks.

With the Italian deal, Metro has successfully divested another unprofitable market, as Piet Bakker's excellent blog rightly predicted would soon be announced earlier this week - which might help improve the company's somewhat gloomy financial results. I still think those numbers are far from fantastic, as indicated here, even though Metro's CEO, Per Mikael Jensen did his best to convince me they were during our talk after the company presented its 2nd quarter (Q2) and half year results 20 July.

"A 12 per cent decline in net revenues is a great result! It's a pretty good result compared to a lot of other media companies," he told me, adding that it was down from minus 16-17 per cent in Q1. Of course, Q2 is usually a better quarter than Q1 for media companies, but the main reason for his exuberance was how a substantial amount of the costs dragging down the result (read the key figures here) was restructuring costs:

"We lost 20 million Euros in 2008, but 11 of those were in the US and Spain. When you close down those operations you have to take the cost, but these are one-off costs: they will not come back. This is why we are reasonably optimistic about the future," he said, and pointed out that at least Metro paid people the money they were owed: "We closed down Spain in a mature way, paid all or dues." Yes, that thick sarcasme is all about Nyhedsavisen, and those "crazy Icelandic guys" as Jensen dubbed them, but that's perhaps a topic for another post (parts of the interview with the Metro boss is available in Norwegian here).

However, I was going to write about Metro International and McDonald's. Mind you, not about McJournalism or the McDonaldization of news, in this case I'm much more interested in the business model. Of course, McDonald's does operate some of its own restaurants, especially in the UK. I don't know if these are the most profitable restaurants or are in markets the company knows intimately, but Metro's strategy has certainly been to hold on to core markets where they've managed to turn over a profit and reduce financial losses and risk by entering into franchise agreements and/or joint ventures in so-called non-core markets.  

Now, McDonald's is so often used to describe everything that's wrong in this world that comparing Metro to it makes it sound like I'm slagging the freesheet publisher off, but one thing you can't take away from McDonald's is its global reach and popularity. The guarantee of getting the same diet, though often with local options on the menue, everywhere has proved to have worldwide appeal. Also, it's the kind of low-cost brand which should prosper in the current downturn as more healthy options becomes too expensive for some - which, if the comparison holds true, at least sounds like good news for Metro's shareholders...

Update 01.08: Michael Jennings pointed out on Twitter yesterday that this comparison is far from perfect, I obviously know the media business better than the fast food business. Apparently McDonald's owns the real estate on which most of its franchised restaurants sit, then the franchisee uses their business model to increase property value.

Newspaper boss: doom-mongers fail to take our innovation plans into account

Is Mecom on the road to hell?

Today former Mecom-optimist, media analyst Henrik Schultz, told a colleague of mine he had yet to recover his faith in the pan-Europaen newspaper company despite the rights issue completion, which reminded me of a recent Danish Mecom controversy with an interesting twist:

Ealier this month Jyllands-Posten (JP), a comptetitor to Mecom's Danish flagship Berlingske Tidende, commissioned an independent analysis of the British-based company's accounts and prospected earnings from Dansk Aktie Analyse. The analysis concluded that the company was steering towards bankruptcy and would not be able to meet the next covenant test in 2010.

JP's article on this provoked strong reactions from Mecom, including one especially interesting one from Mecom's Danish CEO, Lisbeth Knudsen."You draw completely irresponsible conclusions without knowing our development plans," she wrote in her repy to the newspaper (my translation) - a reply (at least the bit that JP printed) which didn't contest the actual figures and calculations, including the conclusion that Mecom needed a significant increase in ad revenue to meet the covenant test, but seemed to insinuate that the budgetary goals would be met by cost-cutting and/or increased revenues from innovation.

I am perhaps reading too much into that statement, but the only "innovations" I know of on the agenda for Mecom Denmark are charging for online content and making all journalists online journalists from September on. Will that be enough? Knudsen is a very clever lady, I'm sure the whole industry would pay very close attention if it turns out she has found some new ground-breaking money making scheme to improve the balance sheets of Mecom's worst performing newspaper market, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Mecom boss David Montgomery called JP's accusations "irresponsible and selfish speculations from a rival media player" and said the agreement reached with the company's lenders was sensible and realistic, taking continued financial turbulence into account.

Still, Schultz is not impressed: "Mecom is bankrupt already in the sense that the shareholders have lost their money. In reality the shareholders have lost money by having to put up money for the rights issue," he said, adding that the rights issue gives the company a new chance but that there certainly are challenges ahead (including that ad market the whole industry seems to be hoping against hope will recover soon)- and he wouldn't recommend buying Mecom shares now.

I've seen several positive shareholder reactions to today's RNS though, the gist of it being that to hold a conference call after presenting its half year results 6 August, surely, the company must have some good news to convey. Let's hope that's not another false hope....      

These Desperate Advertisement Times

Some believe "confidence is creeping back on the menu" at adlands lunch tables, which should also benefit of the starving media hounds so dependent on those almighty ad masters in the end, but, so far, not much evidence of that is forthcoming.

For one, as the first media company I've seen, Metro International posted second quarter earnings today - and it made for pretty gloomy reading. I'll return to that later, but, in the meantime, here's a quick look at what it actually looks like out there in media-ad-land: 

Whenever I'm forced to use news sites - I get most of my news via RSS and Twitter, but unfortunately the latter often takes me through to news sites - I often find myself thinking that advertisement also comes with news content these days. Sometimes I'm even so turned off by wading through all the advertisement I give up trying to read that particular article.

I know these are desperate time, but with news sites turning their frontpages into ads; running whole page ads you have to watch before you get to the article and inundating you with pop-up ads in the form of cars, planes and other forms of creative advertisement running over the text when you finally get to the article you've got to wonder.

You'd think at least they earn good money when the ad takeup is so good as on the site featured below, but rumours have it that, at least in the Norwegian market, the competition for the advertiser's gold is so stiff that rebates are massive. My sources tell me one of the country's big media companies offer as much as 80 per cent rebate on listed advertisement prices. 80 per cent, that sounds like madness to my ears.

 

Now I don't follow the Dutch advertisement market closely, other than reading certain media company reports, but I had a hard time reading this article and would've given up if it wasn't for the topic:

With both these news sites the advertisement saturation is such that it's actually hard to avoid clicking on ads, Hans Kullin has looked at the all too similar situation in Sweden and Denmark.

A Conspiracy of Paper and the Spiderweb of Credit

"A system of credit is like a great spiderweb - you cannot see it until you are trapped within it, and you cannot see the spider until she dangles above you, poised to devour."

Now here's a description that fits like hand in glove for the many personal accounts I've heard on people who've found themselves trapped in the credit snare, and I wonder if the description doesn't feel familiar to all those (media) company owners currently struggling to restructure the mountain of debts they've accumulated in happier times. The memory of Mecom-boss David Montgomery telling a group of journalists, myself included, that the company didn't have enough debt back in April 2007 springs to mind, but I'm digressing.

The quote is from a book I was reading last week, called "A Conspiracy of Papers", and, even though it is set in eighteenth-centry London and deals with the origins of today's financial markets, I was struck by the parallels to today's financial realities. The book is historical crime of the kind I must admit I have penchant for, Neal Stephenson's triology "The Baroque Cycle" is another good example, and, amid all the action, the characters find time to discuss things like the soundness, or lack thereof, of shifting from coin to banknotes e.g in paragraphs such as this:

"But silver is silver. Coins are clipped because you can take them to Spain or India or China and exchange it for something that you desire. You cannot do that with a banknote, because there is nothing to support the promise outside its point of origin... these financial institutions are committed to divesting our money of value and replacing it with promises of value. For when they control the promise of value, they control all wealth itself."

Now, it gets rather philosophical, most things do if you look deep enough, but this currency-debate has not gone away: you still find those who advocate that currency should be based on real or objective values, like gold, today. More to the point, imagine how we've gone from debating a gold-based vs paperbased economy to one where a complicated web of derivatives and credit can bring down the global economy, as happened with sub-prime, collateral debt obligations (CDOs), credit default swaps and what have you not.

I'm reminded of this brilliant visualisation of the credit crisis, and I'm afraid I belong to those who think we're not out of the woods from that crisis yet, far from - especially not media companies who are struggling to deleverage, find a more viable business model and at the same time suffering the effects of the collapse in the advertisement market. Things are not looking great.

But back to the macroperspective: while reading the book I found myself wondering how much and how little has changed, and how, even if the financial market and its instruments have grown ever more complex, many of the arguments remain very similar. Just listen to this bit from Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria:

Finance has a history of messing up, from the Dutch tulip bubble in 1637 to now. The proximate causes of these busts have been varied, but follow a strikingly similar path. In calm times, political stability, economic growth and technological innovation all encourage an atmosphere of easy money and new forms of credit. Cheap credit causes greed, miscalculation and eventually ruin. President Martin Van Buren described the economic crisis of 1837 in Britain and America thusly: "Two nations, the most commercial in the world, enjoying but recently the highest degree of apparent prosperity and maintaining with each other the closest relations, are suddenly plunged into a state of embarrassment and distress. In both countries we have witnessed the same [expansion] of paper money and other facilities of credit; the same spirit of speculation...the same overwhelming catastrophe."

The year the media died

I can't resist sharing this intriguing version of Miss American Pie (The year the media died) here.

I found it via Peter Kirwan and Adam Tinworth, so have a suspicion it's been making the rounds online recently - but I've been rather handicapped this week due to my Toshiba crashing Friday last week, my mobile phone going to the dogs and the new laptop I bought this Friday flashing those blue screens of death at me, so I really don't know for sure. Still, lots of bits to think about in this video, whether you agree with the refrain or not:

Who's robbing us now, Mr Montgomery?

So, Mecom boss David Montgomery has pulled it off again: another covenant extension, his fourth this year, and prospects of raising new equity to the tune of £140 million, despite presenting grim preliminary financial results for 2008 this morning.

Yet it seems the company is still treading water, and yesterday The Norwegian Journalist Union (NJ) was up in arms (in Norwegian) over news Montgomery would transfer roughly £80 m from the saving funds of his Norwegian papers to help appease the company's creditors. As NJ was holding its annual conference yesterday, it reminded me of Montgomery's visit to the same conference in 2007 (which I covered for Propaganda) and this exchange of words:

Moderator: "Many feel you are robbing Edda Media papers: you are emptying the coffers, aren't you?

Montgomery: "That is simply not the case. I don't own the company, the shareholders do, and the shareholders are the pension funds of Europe... Mecom is a conventionally listed company. Money goes back to pension funds, which means ultimately it goes back to you and me."

Moderator: "We are being robbed by pension funds then."

That's only one of many colourful anecdotes from following this company closely for years. Of course, the journalist union has campaigned against Mecom owning Norwegian papers since it first emerged as a potential buyer for Orkla Media in early 2006 - partly because of its high gearing. Some will see proof of "the folly of believing that newspapers can be successful on a sea of debt" in Mecom's recent woes, others will be cheered the company's steered clear of isolvency yet again - but I can see no cheers from the smalltime shareholders so far today...

Update 09:55 CET: news that Independent News & Media (INM) has failed to reach a deal with its bondholders and says there's a "strong likelihood" it will breach its covenants without a deal, brings me another flashback from that 2007 NJ conference.

I asked Montgomery if it really was his opinion, as The Telegraph had suggested the previous day, that there was no rationale for The Guardian or The Independent to exist: "I didn't say that. The Telegraph did. But in general I think companies should make money. I think it's demeaning for people to work for companies that don't," he said.

Update 11:14: CET: Actually, looking over my transcript just now (I always try to find time to type up my notes), that was the conference, and we're talking April 2007, when Montgomery also told the audience that Mecom was a very well-funded company and didn't have enough debt at the moment....

 

Montgomery reading one of his Norwegian newspapers, Drammens Tidende (original photo by Martin H. Jensen, edits by 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:-) )

What did I say?

Pleased to come out of a meeting and find, as I predicted would happen yesterday, that Mecom has secured another covenant test date extension from its banks - this one until 30 April. Not that you had to be a wizard to see that coming, but following the company closely helps. Now for the bigger question: which asset(s) will Mecom sell next? Its minority stake in Dutch AD Niewsmedia, its majority stake in Polish PressPublica, or something else entirely? 

Update 02-04/09, 10am CET: The Telegrahp has an interesting take on yesterday's RNS.