Kristine Lowe

Static stories and news conversations

'I think we need a new journalistic method. It's not the finished articles with a beginning, middle and end that are interesting to comment on.'

The words belong to Paal Hivand, who during a forum for online journalism I launched for Journalisten last week (link in Norwegian), argued that we have to move towards a more dialogue-based presentation form, and come to accept that the new media reality demands we let go of control, dare to be open, dare to share...

So speaks a journalist turned blogger and social media geek. I've kept meaning to come back to my conversation with Paal, as well as this post by Adam on how static stories need to give way to live news. Their arguments are slightly different, I know, but I think the next stage we should (have been) discuss(ing) is how media can better utilize the social web , and these two arguments touch on different aspects of this. Lots more to say here, but keep running out of time, and wanted to jot it down so at least to remind myself. Here's Adam on finished and live news:

The next mindshift change journalists need to go through is that they no longer have a finished product. The issue is never complete. The feature is never done. The news is always evolving. And this is hard for us old-school hacks. If you were to ask a group of people what words they associate with journalism, I'd lay odds that "deadline" would be in there somewhere. But we're moving into a post-deadline age, when the publishing time is now, and then as soon as you have new information. Or a new conversation. Or a new contribution.

The web is providing us with the tools to move away from static "finished" story pages to ones that evolve and change with the news. And we need to work out how to adapt our journalistic processes with it.

How MSM and Marketers can curry favour with bloggers

Cory Doctorow has 17 excellent tips in Information Week (via Bloggers Blog) on how to get bloggers to write about you – which could be just as useful for news sites.

Now, let me first take a moment to say that I've never understood journalists and editors complaining about parasitic bloggers and how they feed off mainstream media (MSM). To my mind, the world wide web is a conversation, or more precisely a cacophony of small and big conversations, and the day people stop talking about your newspaper that's when you should start getting really worried. Besides, blog buzz = link love = traffic, and I can't see how blog-traffic is less valuable than other traffic.

But back to Doctorow. In short, his advice adds up to "link, link and link some more":

Have a link. Have a permanent link. Have a link for everything. Use real links. Use links that go to pages. Flash sites stink (no way to link direct to specific page, no way to copy), PDFs stink (or, as Greenslade once suggested PDF = Pretty Damn Futile) etc ...Anyway, go read in full, got to run now....

Fined for flirting with Gates

Without doubt my favourite headline last week, but the story behind it was probably not a big hit in the headquarters of Fast Search and Transfer who was served a hefty fine of roughly £100,000 (NOK 1.110.220 kroner) for not informing Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) about Microsoft's bid for the company.

According to OSE, Fast should have disclosed that it was being courted by the IT-Giant by 7 November 2007 at the latest, when the sales negotiations were formalised with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

However, that Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Fast, clearly price sensitive information according to OSE, was not made public until 8 January 2008. Hence the fine, and the headline – which strictly speaking I guess should have been "Fined for flirting with Ballmer." After the acquisition of Fast was completed on Friday, Microsoft's CEO paid a secret visit to Oslo on Saturday to reassure Fast's employees about their future roles in the company. He was greeted by Digi.no and Anders Brenna, who recorded the visit for posterity here.

Detail from picture by Anders Brenna.

Of course, the headline isn't all that great from a SEO-point of view, but that's another matter...

Danish campaign for more love in the media

A former advertising man has chosen a spectacular way to encourage Danish journalists to focus on good news.

He has gone to the drastic step of mortgaging his flat in order to pay for a supplement in this week's Journalisten, the trade journal for Danish journalists, where he asks Danish hacks to write a positive story every time they write a negative one.

Jan Thygesen Poulsen told Journalisten.dk he took out a mortgage on his flat so he could pay £13,000 to produce, print and distribute a 12-page supplement entitled "Journalism with heart" to the 13,500 members of the Danish Journalist Union.

"I have done this because I hope to create the kind of world I want to live in. And if it succeeds, I will fulfill my dream: to meet people heart to heart," he writes on his website, adding that he was tired of negativism and a pessimistic view of life.

Thygesen Poulsen has a long track record of working to spread his gospel of joy. In 1999 he started the Laughter club (Latterklubben) and a year after he instituted the Global day of laughter (7 May).

Now me, I'm telling you all this in order to compensate for my very negative post yesterday, when everything was just doom and gloom (nothing worked: the 'crucial' things in life, such as online connection, trains, money, weather – all conspired against me).

Having said that, I don't throw tantrums, and very rarely loose my temper (I'm more of a "if looks or words could kill" kind of person"), which means I'm now looking forward to penning the scathing termination note I'll write to my current online provider when I'm finally able to switch to my new provider. Adriana links to an interesting video on this kind of metamorphis here

Montgomery introduces page three girls

Yesterday was a very eventful media day in my part of the world (so eventful I'm still recovering, hence my cramped blogging style).

We woke up to news that Mecom had acquired Dagbladet, the Norwegian equivalent of The Mirror. It was rumoured Mecom-boss David Montgomery had ordered the struggling paper to introduce page three girls and replaced its staunch feminist editor with the editor of gossip rag Se og Hör, but Mecom refused to comment the news stating that the information was price sensitive. Needless to say, employees were up in arms.

Meanwhile, Trond Giske, Norway's culture minister who've kept threatening Montgomery with non-threats ever since he sat foot in this country, announced he was running for Archbishop. Norway's defense minister on the other hand, unveiled a new law proposal that would see all women who are still single and childless after turning 30 serve a year in the army. And a science mag even found a bunch of aliens somewhere in outer space.

Yes, it was April Fool's day, but also a busy news day. Among the serious news: the Norwegian equivalent of the House of Lords (Odelstinget) vetoed Giske's famed law on editorial freedom, meaning that Norway will soon (could be as early as 1 July) get a law that will protect editors against political and commercial pressures from their owners (at least on paper, some doubt how effective the law will be in reality). More importantly perhaps, the country was on the brink of a national labour strike (avoided in the last hour in the wee hours today).

I must admit I was quite grateful for that compromise as it allowed me a few hours more sleep, as was probably those editors who'd wowed to hand out the papers themselves today if the paper boys were on strike, but, as always, the question of who foots the bill is an interesting one. In this case I wonder if it won't be taxpayers and mortgage-holders, but hey, I don't blog about the economy, and that's good (much too depressing, besides I need some sleep now to improve my blogging form for tomorrow).

Oh, and the story on Mecom and Dagbladet was written by Martin H. Jensen whom I worked for at Propaganda last year, and who is joining us at Journalisten.no in a few weeks.

Frozen Pizza with Champagne and the World's laziest Anarchy

How do you attract the biggest possible audience online?

Schibsted-owned VG's recipe is to give people the diet they had no idea they craved. Norway's public broadcaster, NRK, wants to make it easier for lazy users to take shortcuts.

I forgot to link up this piece I wrote a while back on these two different strategies for gaining the biggest possible online audience. I think comparing these strategies is interesting for two reasons:

1) Vg.no is Norway's most read news site while Nrk.no was one of, if not the, fastest riser(s) on TNS Gallup's list of the country's top ten most used websites last year (five of which currently are news sites).

2) To my mind, these strategies represent two very different takes on serendipity, and it will be interesting to see which of these will be more successful in the long run - as more and more people spend more and more time on the web.

The article is based on this debate, and this blog post's headline is the headline none of my editors, perhaps for obvious reasons, would allow me to use (admittedly, I ditched it myself for the piece I'm linking up here).

NB: I'm using PublicBroadcasting as a tag for the first time on this post. It's far from the first time I've written on public broadcasting, but I've got a huge job to do in terms of re-tagging my posts to make the tags more accurate and consistent (never inteded to write about media when I started this blog in 2005 you see, so need to tidy up those tags on a day I've got aons of time to spend)

Separate online and print staff necessary for online innovation

Is print and online integration really the way forward?

When sifting through my feeds yesterday, I was struck by this line by Poynter's Steve Klein: "until the online and print copy-desk operations are fully merged on a 24/7 basis, they cannot consider themselves truly integrated. It's the future. But it should be the present."

This is interesting because it's quite the opposite of what most of my industry contacts tell me. Take VG.no, for instance, without comparison the most read and the most profitable online newspaper in Norway. Its editor-in-chief, Torry Pedersen, attributes the news sites' success to segregation: to having the equivalent of 'a room of owns one' and being able to develop its own culture.

In fact, he thinks online and print are entirely different disciplines, and, to his mind, being number one in both print and online requires different organisations - he likes to compare this to how feasible it is for one and the same runner to (persistently) win the 100 meter sprint and the marathon during the Olympics (read more about his perspectives on this over at journalism.co.uk).

But this is not a unique sentiment, a lot of my contacts tell me the same, which begs the question: does a newspapers or broadcaster's online edition, like the kept partner in an unequal marriage, need a room of its own to flourish?

If given such a room, does there come a time when the two partners, now on a more equal footing, can live in happy matrimony ever after, or is a union of equally ambitious partners bound to be an unhappy one?

At this point, I should probably admit that this topic reminded me of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own before I had that chat with Pedersen (definitely not his metaphor, but I found it rather amusing) for the journalism.co.uk piece (I'd heard him voice a similar sentiment in less explicit terms before), which means, to continue along those lines, I should probably start talking about Mars and Venus. That however, feels just about as tired as I feel now (terrible line, I know, which is why I think it's about time to call it a day:-) ).

I'd love to hear your opinion though.

Time to come off stone

Interesting post from Shane Richmond on how the term "off stone" epitomises a mentality made redundant by the "digital revolution":

No time limit means publishing faster. Less time, not more.

And the other pressure, on resources, is changing the model too. One school of thought, embraced by journalism unions, is that resource cuts mean dispensing with vital talent so as to boost profits for greedy owners. Yet plenty of newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, not maximise profits, and the pressure comes from outside, not from above.

Our new competitors come from the internet start-up world. Doing more with less is encoded in their DNA. They're taking our readers who, it turns out, don't value us quite as much as we value ourselves.
Our readers are wrong about this, by the way. I firmly believe that journalists are vital to a free society.

Still, it's up to us to make a place for ourselves. We don't get one by right.

I'd like to tell you that you should think about change but it really doesn't matter. The changes are happening anyway, whatever you think of them. It's time to embrace the concept of change and decide how best to implement it...

...But I do know this: nothing is set in stone anymore.

Check out the full post here.

On The Knee-Jerk Journalistic View of Bloggers

Adam over at One Man and his Blog alerted me to this brilliant post by Howard Owens, "Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond shovelware".

Adam is particularly taken by these lines:

Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.

Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.

Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.

For me, who don't teach journos how to blog, it was these lines that really stood out (foremostly because I had something positive to say about them):

Naive as it might be, I haven’t given up hope. I believe journalists can become good bloggers.
Learning to blog really takes turning one simple switch in your head: This isn’t print journalism.

It isn’t the journalism of your cranky old city editor or your sainted j-school prof. Neither of those old farts would approve of blogging in any form, even though blogging is now part of the legitimate media mix.

Well, never say never: my former tutor at City University, Professor Richard 'Probably-knows-every-journalist-in-the-world' Keeble as my co-presenter so aptly called him, recently invited me to give a talk on blogging at Lincoln University, and the journalist who mentored me when I was at the Daily Express' City section, whom I've never known to be cranky, recently invited me to say a few words about blogging to his staff at CityAM.

I've actually seen the attitudes towards blogging in the media industry change massively for the better in the last year or two, at least in England (not as much as I'd like in Norway yet, but certainly in neighbouring Denmark and Sweden where mainstream media have started to use blogs proactively). And, to give the last word to Howard Owens:

In case it’s not obvious: There are lots of different kinds of blogging. This post might be an example essay blogging (if I were to be that pompous about it). There’s also link blogging, and commentary blogging, and news blogging. The kind of blogging a journalist might do depends on the situation, the purpose and the goals. The purpose of this post is merely to say — get over your objections to blogging and start exploring how you can use it in your newsroom to grow readership...

Good stuff, provided Mecom avoids "labour unrest"...

Looking over the various coverage of Mecom's annual results in international media this morning, I was struck by this line from Financial Times (I must admit I've always found it a bit peculiar how FT often adds comments below their articles):

"If Mecom avoids labour unrest, especially in Germany, over merging old and new-media journalistic practices, it should build from here."

Now, anyone who've followed this story will know that most of Mecom is seething with "labour unrest" if we use the term loosely. No, there are currently no strikes that I'm aware of, but there is certainly massive "unrest" over new working practices and an exodus of talent in Denmark, over political issues at Rzeczpospolita in Poland, over cost cuts in Germany and, as Rob noted in the comments, major opposition to merging Mecom's existing Dutch operation, Media Groep Limburg (MGL) with its most recent acquisition, Wegener, the Dutch regional newspaper group. However, there is also, certainly in Norway, enthusiasm for online innovations.

As for merging old and new journalistic practices, a Wegner-journalist once told me that "our journalists have no problem with cross-platform work, but they do have a problem with getting more work to do than fits into 24 hours".

This points to the lingering uncertainty, or even fear, among Mecom journalists about what they can expect, in terms of new working routines and staffing, from their now not-so-new owner. Talking to various sources yesterday, it seemed like the results failed to quell this fear.

The results were pretty much in line with expectations, but the notes on future strategy were too general to provide concrete answers, though an employee representative told me that Montgomery's personal visit to Berlin to deal with staff protests was much appreciated. At least it made this person's sources feel he took them seriously - perhaps in contrast to the CEO of Mecom Germany, Joseph Depenbrock, who've been quoted saying that "he doesn't need the trust of his employees".

In terms of concrete results from the meeting, Montgomery did not agree to the key demands of the journalists at Berliner Zeitung in respect to Depenbrock and cost cuts, but both The Guardian and Netzeitung reports that he will invest in a new editorial system for the paper (which journalists
at the paper had asked for).

On a general note, sifting through all the international Mecom stories I didn't have time to read properly yesterday, I think it's fair to say that UK media coverage of this story is (and has been) characterised by proximity to the City and investor concerns, with the exception of a few tidbits from Germany, while continental coverage of Mecom is very much characterised by proximity to the journalists and their unions. Neither of which, seen separately, will give your the full story of course ...

Note: I've anonymised my sources when the information is based on informal conversations

Berlingske should be grateful for Mecom-ownership

Although it is the worst performing 'Mecom-country', the changes wrought in 2007, has put Berlingske Officin, Mecom's Danish arm, ahead of competition in the Danish market.

At least according to Henrik Schultz, a media analyst at Kaupthing, who follows Scandinavian media companies closely. "Montgomery has performed much better than previous owners, and implemented sensible and necessary restructuring. If the market should deteriorate, Berlingske is in a much better position to deal with it now, and that's thanks to Montgomery," he told Journalisten.dk after Mecom presented its preliminary results for 2007 yesterday.

It's worth keeping in mind that Berlingske also was Orkla's Achilles heel when they owned the company. In an informal conversation, a Norwegian union representative once described the situation in Berlingske when Orkla bought it in terms that made it sound very similar to The Mirror in the seventies (in contrast to Norway, this person said, where staffing already "had been cut to the bone"). That said, there is a lot of unease within Berlingske Officin about the current restructuring.

But back to those results. When I talked to Schultz early yesterday, he said Mecom's overall results were "a good step towards something better: decent, but not impressive when we know the results come at the top of a period of good trade". He supported his argument by how the share didn't exactly "go through the roof", but had improved modestly when we talked (at which point it was up 1.25 pence. At the end of the day, it closed up 4.25 pence at 29.75 pence). He said investor disappointment is a huge risk for the company, which he previously has said will struggle to deliver the profits they've promised short term, although he is quite positive about the long term prospects.

Mecom's preliminary annual results for 2007 were slightly ahead of expectations. "Mecom said its adjusted pretax profit before exceptional items and amortisation in the year to end-December was 53 million pounds. The company was forecast to make pretax profit before amortisation and exceptional charges of 49.50 million pounds, inside a 46.7-52.4 million range, according to poll of four analysts polled by Reuters Estimates" (follow the link for the key figures, full results here)

Are Schibsted's corporate bylaws dragging down its share price?

Now, here's an interesting contrarian take on what's bringing down Schibsted's share price.

To say that these are not the jolliest of times for media shares would be an understatement. Schibsted, the Norwegian based media group, much praised internationally for its successful online transition, has seen its share price halved since October - from roughly 300 NOK to roughly 150 NOK.

The market consensus seems to be that, like other media companies, it is being punished for its heavy reliance on the mood swings in the advertisement market, and the market is growing doubtful of the viability of its international expansion - in particular its freesheet business. In short: the share is considered high risk as well as cyclical.

But here's another take on this scenario, investor Michael Roessler over at Key Event suggests that "the reason for the persistent market discount to intrinsic value" is that Schibsted's corporate bylaws are written such that majority ownership is not at the 50.01pc level, but at 75.01pc.

In other words, he is saying that The Tinius Trust, created to safeguard the editorial freedom of Schibsted's newspapers, is dragging down the share price.

Admittedly, this suggestion is based on a research report he did in 2005, and by now many of his findings are outdated – Schibsted has largely moved out of TV, while consolidating online, in classifieds and newspapers and expanding in the free newspaper segment – but the corporate bylaws remain. Though Tinius himself passed away in November, it was his hope that these bylaws would be his lasting legacy - and as long as clever inheritance lawyers do not manage tamper with them, it will be, so this still makes for interesting reading (for the full report, follow the link in Mr Roessler's post):

History, Dear Watson
Schibsted in Norway, like Bonnier in Sweden, is a modern implementation of a very old, family-run business. The Schibsted’s have owned the Aftenposten newspaper for 145 years, since 1860.

Mr. Tinius Nagell-Erichson, a member of a branch of the original family, used the cash flow from Aftenposten to buy other papers like Verdens Gang in the 1960’s and was instrumental in introducing the tabloid version.

Mr. Tinius Nagell-Erichson was further instrumental in transforming the private, family-owned business into a holding corporation. Other family members sold their shares in an IPO, but Tinius Nagell-Erichson did not sell.

In what I think he would term an act of duty, he cemented his dominance in the Norwegian national media flag-ship with a 26.1pc ownership and cleverly written bylaws.
At Schibsted, a shareholder majority is not everything above 50pc, but rather everything above 75pc. This corresponds nicely to Nagell-Erichson’s 26.1pc ownership. There is no majority without his shares.

Sell side analysts attribute Schibsted’s lower valuation relative to comparables to “higher perceived risk.” Specifically, analysts cite Schibsted’s “bold acquisitions” as “risky and aggressive.” Danske Securities, for example, argues that a major reason for the,

“persistently low valuation” of Schibsted is the, “higher risk perceived by investors. Schibsted’s relatively high earnings volatility and the stock’s much higher trading volatility are just two examples of this. Schibsted probably confidently expects its valuation to improve markedly and move closer in line with peers’.” – Henrik Schultz, Danske, December 22, 2004.

I believe that this argument is a complete mischaracterization of Schibsted and utterly misses the role of history in Schibsted’s corporate structure today.

First, there is nothing bold or aggressive in the character of Schibsted’s management. Acquisitions at Schibsted are not primarily a proactive, innovative strategic vision for developing the company into the future, but rather a reactive strategy in defense of the threatened markets and their revenues. Schibsted seems to back into its acquisitions when it is motivated by fear...

Even the latest attempt to acquire Alma Media is reaction to threatened ad revenue... Schibsted’s acquisition strategy is not aggressive. It is defensive...

Depenbrock keeps dual role amid other Mecom changes

Not much came of the Berliner Zeitung journalists' demands that their proprietor, Mecom-boss David Montgomery, divest the newspaper if he was not planning to invest in it and get rid of his henchman in Germany, Joseph Depenbrock.

According to Taz.de, Montgomery, who had travelled to Berlin to convey his answer personally, said Depenbrock would stay where he was and Mecom's commitment to Berliner Zeitung might last forever (more on Montgomery's Berlin visit here).

Neither answer would have gone down well. Even though the argument of Montgomery only being in it for the short-term, that, no matter what he says, he will milk the companies dry and then hit the road, is frequently used against him, it seems many Mecom-journalists fear the prospect of being milked dry for all eternity much more, and, like so many other newspapers folks these days, long for that knight in shining armour with bottomless pockets: no reckless gambler or profit-chaser, but an independently wealthy, reliable and benign philantropist unaffected by the ups and downs of the marketplace.

The Group Employee council
As for Depenbrock, the fact that he holds the dual role of editor-in-chief and managing director, may be unheard if in Germany, but is not uncommon in other Mecom-countries such as Norway and Holland. Therefore, Mecom's group employee council did not offer an opinion on Depenbrock's role, other than acknowledging that he didn't have the trust of his employees, but did express their sympathy with the general concerns of the staff at Beliner Zeitung.

"The Group Employee Council in Mecom expresses our support to the Works Council in Berliner Verlag in their protests against severe cuts in staff in the company. We do fully understand their frustration when met with cost cutting programs together with demands of profit margin up to 18 - 20 %. In our opinion it is very unwise for management to set unrealistic goals for net profit, when the consequences will be very negative both for the people losing their jobs, the quality of the newspapers and the general goodwill of the company," they said in a statement issued 19 February.

Strictly speaking, the employee representation system in Mecom has been a bit unclear since Mecom Europe ceased to exist and Mecom's headquarter was relocated to London. In short, without going into too much technical details, laws on employee representation differs in the UK and in Europe, but a new structure for employee representation is currently being negotiated and expected to be in place later this spring.

The Reshuffle
In contrast to Depenbrock, Keith Allen, whom several Mecom sharholders lost their faith in after a botched profit warning in January, did not get to keep his job. Last Wednesday, when I found myself running from CityAM to Metro International and then on to Google's London headquarters, Mecom announced that John Allwood would replace Keith Allen as finance director, while Allen was appointed chief operating officer. In a statement, Mecom stressed how Allwood's "financial track record and experience of European business will be invaluable to Mecom."

The Remakes
Meanwhile, away from all the management keruffle, several of Mecom's newspapers have recently undergone, or are in the process of undergoing, a facelift. In Germany, Netzeitung was recently relaunched in a new, green design. In Denmark, Urban, the youth-oriented freesheet of Berlingske Officin, Mecom's Danish arm, was recently relaunched with a new 'human-oriented' profile (all the stories and pictures have to have humans in them, no landscapes, buildings, financial results only - although I'm not sure if they uphold the distinction American journalists like to make between RPs, Real Persons, and BBs, Babbling Bureaucrats, or if BBs are considered human as well). In Norway, the local and regional newspapers of Mecom's Norwegian arm, Edda Media, is getting a new design framework later this spring.

Montgomery to address German Mecom-conflict

Mecom-boss David Montgomery is expected to attend to the increasingly tense situation at the Berliner Zeitung in a visit to Berlin this week, according to Financial Times Deutschland, who claims nothing less than a war is raging in Berlin (in German).

Now, several concerned readers from various Mecom-countries contacted me last week to hear if I had seen the latest stories by international media on the trouble in Berlin. The answer is twofold: on the one hand, I've covered parts of this story in Norwegian for Journalisten but been too busy to blog; on the other hand, international media have been slow to pick up and then mostly just skimming the surface, so, to make up for the recent lack of Mecom-blogging here, here's a recap of the main Mecom headlines in February with some tidbits you might not have picked up elsewhere:

The Letter

Dear Mr Proprietor,

If you intend to be such a money-pincher, we demand a new owner. If you fail to comply, we'll make your life miserable.

Sincerely Yours,
staff at Berliner Zeitung

This might not have been the exact wording of the famous letter that explains Montgomery's vist to Berlin, but it's pretty much the essence of it.

In the evening of 14 February, while the management at Berliner Verlag, Mecom's German arm, were busy preparing an annual party with 'stakeholders' such as local celebrities and politicians, the employees crafted an open letter in which they demanded that Joseph Depenbrock, the joint editor-in-chief and commercial director of Mecom's German operations, was replaced and drastic cost cutting measures abandoned. If these demands were not met, they urged Montgomery to sell Berliner Zeitung to another owner, threatening industrial action if he failed to comply.

The confrontation

In the letter, the employees made it clear that neither Depenbrock nor Montgomery commanded their trust, to which Depenbrock responded, according to SüdDeutsche Zeitung, that he did not need the trust of his employees.

Enter David Montgomery, the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Irishman who calmly and diplomatically faces all the abuse thrown at him. Yes, this is very much the public image we've seen of Montgomery in his new role as a European media mogul so far. He may have gone to Berlin as the peace-maker, to demand that management and employees sort out their differences, or to more or less diplomatically remind his employees of the brutal reality they face. In either case, we should know soon....

More on the outcome and other Mecom tidbits here

On doing things "The Drupal Way"

Drupal, a long time favourite free content management system of web hacker-geeks, is going mainstream.

In Denmark, national news sites such as Information.dk, as well as media sites Mediawatch.dk and Journalisten.dk are among those who have swapped their expensive and often complicated content management systems (CMS) for the free open-source software. But open software does have its unique challenges...

Read more over at Journalism.co.uk

Nikolaj Opstrup, head of development at Mediawatch

Schibsted merger approved

Schibsted's plans to create a giant newspaper group that will see Schibsted-owned national Aftenposten 'merged' with regional newspapers Faedrelandsvennen, Stavanger Aftenblad and Bergens Tidende was approved against all odds on Tuesday.

Norway's media authority, Medietilsynet, ruled against the merger last summer, arguing that Schibsted's dominant online position, and the relative size and influence of the newspapers involved, would give the merged company, Media Norway, a much too dominant position in the Norwegian newspaper market, but on Tuesday this decision was overturned by a complaint's commission.

The new 'merged' newspaper group will further strengthen Schibsted's already dominant position in the country's newspaper market and will have all sorts of interesting implications. In a debate last March, the chair of the debate asked Birger Magnus, a Schibsted exec, if the new construction would not mean much greater reliance on syndication, and if that wouldn't mean reduced staffing and a situation where you had only one journalist to cover each subject across many titles. "You have to do that, but you have to do it in a clever way," said Magnus.

The four newspapers already have an agreement in place which allows them to recirculate each others staff-produced articles and are working to implement a similar agreement for the freelance-articles they commission.

It is however unclear if Media Norway will compensate the freelancers properly for the fact that they might see their articles used in all the Media Norway newspapers. One Schibsted editor told me that there was nothing in the freelance rates that said freelancers should be compensated on the basis of increased circulation. This prompted one of our readers at Journalisten.no to ask if this meant readers would now get all the Media Norway newspapers for the price of one.

So interesting times ahead. The country's culture minister has already pledged to work harder to get a new, broader media law, that would also take into account the ownership share of the online news market, in place.

It's not new media MSM is failing at: it's social media

In his post on how Local news is changing - but not fast enough, Paul Bradshaw effectively and poignantly pinpoints what mainstream media is struggling to catch up with.

To me, the quote below, is the perefect illustration that this is not new media - to my my mind, new media is just digitalised old media - but social media. And essentially, the latter is not so much about the tools as about the mindset. This is also one of my hobby horses: I believe, as I've said before, that all journalists today work at the intersection of social media and mainstream media (MSM), and these are the skills needed to maneuver this territory successfully (the 'uneven' distribution of these skills, as well as management's failure to grasp how essential these are, is, leaving aside the financial aspect, to a large extent why MSM is struggling online):

...there are hundreds of journalists who need re-educating and training in everything from video and podcasting to social networking, managing databases, and online etiquette.

And they all have newspapers to get out.

Because “Web-first” is still a strategy in publishing only - not in journalism and storytelling. For most journalists - and even more editors - the web is still a ‘channel’, not a place. It’s somewhere to put stuff - that’s why video took off so quickly: it was something everyone could understand. They’d seen it on the telly.

What needs to be made clear is that the internet makes news a service, not a product; that every action of a journalist online - commenting, blogging, networking, twittering, posting to YouTube - is an act of distribution, and because they’re not doing those things, great stories aren’t being read as much as they should, or told as well as they could...

Have you been un-Twinglied?

It seems we have a new measure for media bias: Did someone just remove the Twingly link to the blog post in which you commented on one of the news site's articles?

In the old days we spoke of all those issues that simply fell off the agenda, or the issues leftists felt was wrongly represented in right-wing media and vice versa. Access to the editorial pages of mainstream media was for the select few. Now that several newspapers have started linking up blogreactions to their news articles with services like Twingly, broadcasting your views on mainstream media coverage - not only on your blog, but also to the journalists or columnists responible for that coverage - is easier than ever.

Or not? Swedish thinker Johan Norberg claims on his blog (in Swedish) that Dagens Nyheter (DN) first removed all the Twingly links to an article by Andreas Malm which Norberg blogged about and linked to, then put them up again but omitted the link to Norberg's blog post, in which he defends himself against Malm's claims. Malm levies pretty serious allegations against Norberg, an ardent defender of globalisation best known internationally for his book "In defense of global capitalism", naming Norberg as a contributor to some kind of Islamophobic hell if I read him correctly.

When I talked to DN's online editor, Charlotta Friborg, before Christmas, my impression was that they only removed Twingly links to blatantly racist comments. I can think of several 'derogatory' names to call Mr. Norberg, some of which I know he'd welcome (I know him from more than ten years back), but racist is certainly not one of them (neither is Islamophobe).

Update 20/2: More on this debate on untwinglying, or Twingly censorship, whichever you prefer, here from Dagens Media (in Swedish)

Weighed and found Wanting? Un-Twingliable?

(I snapped this picture at a market, which name I've forgotten, in NewcastleGateshead)

Influence on the Web is all about connectivity

It's been months since I revisited the value of linking out, so it was great to stumble across this post by Publishing 2.0 (via Martin Stabe), which contained too many eloquent lines on the power of the hyperlink to include them all on del.icio.us. My favourite parts:

The reason Google’s search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos. Savvy web users — many college age or early 20s — pooled their links on Digg and developed the power to drive server-crashing volumes of traffic, forcing traditional media sites, who still lack such influence, to plaster themselves with Digg This buttons...

...Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course).........

Danish news site starts linking to blogreactions

On Tuesday this week, Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark's leading newspapers, started using Twingly to show blog links to the sites' articles (I covered the news here, in Norwegian. More about Politiken's reasons for doing so here, in Danish).

As it happened, this was one day before the newspaper decided to republish pictures of one of the controversial Mohammed cartoons, and I had honestly forgotten about this when I blogged about it, but as the links started coming in I got a chance to investigate the effects of linking up blogs in this way further (I blogged about Norwegian and Swedish news sites' experiences with using Twingly here). I'd expected a lot more bloggers to link to the Politiken-article with the cartoon, but so far Twingly only shows five blog links.

Effects and causes
I got quite a bit of traffic from the link though, more than what I got from links from e.g. Financial Times or Washington Post, but less than what you'd get from many bloggers with a big following linking to you – but I think that has something to do with the topic being so controversial.

Not that I'm too fussed about traffic, I'd take 10 blog readers who are genuinely interested in what I write about over 1000 random readers any old day, but I'm curious about the effects of linking up bloggers this way. The people I talked to at the Norwegian and Swedish sites (Dagbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter) who'd used Twingly for some time said it created more loyal readers rather than more traffic, and also that it provided valuable feedback for the journalists.

Bridge to the blogosphere
Or, for a more poetic description of the dynamics at work: "Dagbladet's use of Twingly helps to build bridges. It opens up a communication channel to the blogosphere. It's interesting for me as a blogger because it gives me exposure, but it ought to be interesting for the journalism as well because you get other perspectives," Eirik Newth said in a debate I covered recently.

Which reminds me, to get even more poetic, of a line from a poem, Landscape by Norwegian poet Aase-Marie Nesse (my translation): "We are all islands, in an abruptly deep, pacific ocean – but the word is a bridge".

I'm sure there is a great metaphore to be made here about how newspapers have become too insular, cut themselves off from the world or something, but I'm too tired to try to make it (suggestions welcome). A more cynical way to look at it is that linking up bloggers is an attempt to regain lost influence, seeing that power and influence on the web is all about connectivity (link via Martin Stabe), but I'm getting too flippant here, been up since before the break of dawn, so think I'd better get some sleep....