Kristine Lowe

Another news site moves to open software

Journalisten.se, the news site of Swedish trade publication Journalisten, published by Sweden's journalist union, unveiled its brand new website just after Christmas. The site is built in textpattern, an almost bloglike open software solution. Apart from the much improved layout, the new site is a joy for all RSS-lovers, offering separate feeds for the various sections of the site such as opinion pieces, job ads, news articles etc. Journalisten's editor told me they'd chosen textpattern due to the much simpler content management system, delivered by Netrelations, and the opportunity to display all the websites' various sections better.

Other news sites using open software in Scandinavia include Reiser og Ferie (Joomla) and ABC Nyheter (Drupal) in Norway and Information.dk (Drupal) in Denmark.

What would we do without internet?

It was Christmas day in a tiny village in a remote corner of the world. My mum wanted to go to church, yet the local paper didn't list at what the times the Christmas sermons were on.

Abdicating local coverage?
Now, we could talk of abdicating coverage and all of that, but I have a hunch the common practice is that churches have to pay for ads to get the times mentioned, and, in either case, there's always the internet: of course the Norwegian state church has its own homepage that lists sermons in various towns and cities...

The Government gets RSS-feeds (or, RSS is now at the political realm's disposal, let's hope it 'gets it' as well)
....via Andreas I even learned today that the Norwegian Government finally has managed to add RSS-feeds for each and every government department to its website, with separate feeds for the parliament's two chambers, for press releases, white papers, green papers etc. Now if the politicians and lobby groups could only learn to subscribe to the documents they need via newsreaders, we might save a small forest each month - and maybe this country could edge a bit closer to deserving all those political claims to being a world champion in environmentalism, though when it comes to digital democracy the Estonians are still way ahead of the game....

Swedish newsstands deprived of FHMs poster girls

The Bonnier-owned publishing house that publishes FHM in Scandinavia, announced this week that it had decided to close the Swedish edition of the male mag.

'The mag faced too much competition, not from the other Swedish male mags, but from the internet,' said editor-in-chief Tobias Wickström. Other commentators said the mag simply failed to grab a satisfactionary market share in a crowded market.

Now, this is where it get's interesting: I'm currently testing the webagent Cision is offering companies to monitor the Scandinavian blogosphere with. I must admit I'm not very impressed so far, it seems like the combination of my own (free) keyword searches and RSS-feeds is more effective, but Cision's webagent did throw up this amusing reaction to FHM being pulled from the Swedish market (my translation):

I'm worried about my little brother
FHM is folding and my thoughts go to my little brother Max and his abundance of testosterone. FHM is God and Max is his apprentice. He even has a FHM calendar on his wall (and changes months if he thinks the current month's chick is ugly). I hope he survives this with his health intact. I don't want him to become any more funny than what he already is. I will have to call mum and consult with her, perhaps we have to set up some sort of a crisis- and emergency facility.

From Interessesmurfen

Southern California fires coverage shows potential of internet facilitated reporting

With every new major disaster these days, we see evidence that mainstream media finally is waking up to the power of internet facilitated reporting: experimenting with Google Maps, You Tube, Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, Facebook and various other aggregation and social networking tools.

A few weeks back it was Burma and it's citizen journalists leading the way, this week it's the coverage of the Wildfires in Southern California.

Martin Stabe reports how San Diego TV station News 8 has "responded to the crisis on its patch by taking down its entire regular web site and replacing it with a rolling news blog, linking to YouTube videos of its key reports, plus Google Maps showing the location of the fire.

"There are links to practical information that their viewers will need at this time, including how to contact insurance companies, how to volunteer or donate to the relief efforts, evacuation information and shelter locations.

"It’s an exemplary case study in how a local news operation can respond to a major rolling disaster story by using all the reporting tools available on the Internet," he concludes.

Of course, not all news organisations are equally innovative. As always, though the future may already be here, it's far from evenly distributed – to the dismay and frustration of many of us. Here's Kevin Anderson, blog editor of The Guardian, writing on his personal blog:

"If part of news organisations’ job is to be a trusted guide, why are so many blind to the aggregating this content and helping their audience navigate it? ...I’m still baffled why web aggregation during breaking news with follow up interviews still are the exception not the norm. There are all of these people living through a news event making themselves known through blog posts, photo sharing sites, social networking sites and more, and yet we’re still telling the story through wire copy, agency video and stills..."

Bloggers Blog has a good overview of online reporting and resources from California here.

Welcome back to Oslo (or the dangers of relying solely on your newsreader for news)

I arrived the city safely from my trip to the coast, although at the wrong bus stop (must have been a new driver). Then, just as I was boarding the underground train that would take me from the city centre and home, a pickpocket unzipped my backpack and stole my wallet.

I only realised what had happened the minute the doors closed and the train started moving. I went back, but of course, no trace, no witnesses, so off to the police I went. When I finally did get home I was (almost) penniless, very angry (mostly with myself for not noticing) and decidedly thirsty, but had consigned myself to drinking tea and water 'til I could convince one of my clients whose payment is overdue to pay me (my budget for this week was in that wallet).

But no, the minute I stepped over the threshold I was greeted with the news that the city's drinking water had been contaminated, and when I got down to the mall I found that my last coins couldn't even buy me water: it was all sold out.

Of course, had I checked the national news this morning, like normal people do, I would have known about the contaminated water and might have decided to stay on in that lovely village on the coast, but no: I only checked RSS-feeds in my newsreader this morning. So I knew all the big and small media stories of the day in various corners of the world, the key financial and business headlines, a bit about what was going on in the lives of people near and dear who blog, a bit about the lives of bloggers I don't know but like to read, but I didn't have a clue about the contaminated drinking water in the city I live...

Celebrity scandals and the trouble with Bloglines

Now, I was planning to write the post on media's celebrity obsession last week, and gleefully report towards the end that getting minimal exposure to celebrity news is easier than ever in world where you can slice and dice content as you see fit with RSS and newsreaders.

Why bother with the news that annoy you, when you can choose to subscribe only to your favourite feeds or keywords within feeds?

However, life and work intervened, and this week I'm not quite so gleeful. I've been using Bloglines for a long time, but its performance keeps getting worse and worse.

One of the charms of using a newsreader is how it's supposed to show updates the minute a site has been updated. This function has been painfully slow in Bloglines recently, so slow that one Bloglines user wrote:

"I've gotten so desperate for updates that I've been surfing over to the INDIVIDUAL WEB SITES. Help!"

The problem has been exacerbated by several of my feeds, including my standing Technorati searches, only showing up "Internal Server Error" during the last few days, which has made me realise how much I've come to rely on my newsreader.

To loose the massive archive of posts I've built up over time in Bloglines feels almost like the nightmare scenario of suffering a laptop crash only to realise you've forgotten to back up your files.

But, even though the prospect of switching newsreaders seem daunting, got to find a way of saving my Bloglines archive, the service has been so unreliable recently - unread feeds disappearing, slow to update etc - that I realise it would make life much easier if I did.

I've been looking at ZapTXT as it's supposed to guarantee instant updates - I've come to rely more and more on my newsreader also for work and for tracking stories - but would be grateful for any advice...

Sun gets green light for web-first corporate news

As of next Monday, 30 July, Sun Microsystems will start releasing key corporate news over the Internet, via the company's website and RSS-feeds. It's thought to be the first time a US company has been allowed to use the web as it's main channel for price-sensitive information and follows protracted negotiations between Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz and Christopher Cox, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman – made public on Schwartz's blog.

Financial Times has the background story. Here's Schwartz on the implications:

Referencing a dialog we've established with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, and its Chairman Cox, this will place, for the first time, the general investing public - those with a web browser or a cell phone - on the same footing as those with access to private subscription services. In effect, driving an open dialog directly with investors, rather than routing information through proprietary sources. Open is as open does.

I believe this change will increase the transparency of our business, fulfill our desire to disseminate information on a fair and equitable basis, and allow the network to be used for what it's intended - connecting people and information... I wonder how far off we are from ceasing to issue traditional press releases altogether... after all, no news agency could possibly suggest they reach a greater portion of the planet than the internet.

Watch out for a brave new future where you get your press releases via RSS-feeds you subscribe to, rather than as a nuisance clogging up your email box. Okay, lots of companies are already using RSS to distribute press releases, but being able to distribute price-sensitive information this way: now that's a milestone.

The Power of RSS

I found this comment from Craig McGinty on Robin Hamman's blog, and I couldn't resist republishing it here, as the mind-boggling importance of RSS is one of my hobby horses:

Something any online publication has to appreciate is that their audience is no longer at the bottom of the funnel, being drip-fed news and features. Thanks to RSS (I accept it's still early days but its use is growing) people have now flipped the funnel and can vacuum up what interests them and roll their own news service.

They can stay in touch with what they want, when they want and turn the tap off once happy. Publications need to slice their content up so that people can follow sections, make it easy to follow comments via RSS or subscribe to keywords wrapped up in a feed that tells them when something new is published. It might not be possible to hit all these marks at the same time but they are worth having on the agenda.

I could say that I keep praying for newspapers to slice up their content in sections, like in why don't The Times (UK) and Börsen (DK) have media feeds available, but that would be a lie: in the end, when a publication hasn't sliced up its feed in this way, I just stop reading it...

How Web 2.0 is your newspaper?

Internet consultant Martin Belam reviews the Web 2.0 features and implementation of the online versions of The Daily Express, The Times, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Independent , The Sun and The Guardian. This should be mandatory reading for all editors and execs as most newspapers have quite some way to go here.

A general complaint from Belam on newspaper blogs: "Newspapers seem to have grasped that the blog format can be a compelling one with the right content, and that good blogs can act as incoming link bait, but on the whole the British press seems unable to have grasped how linking out is just as an important part of blog culture".

That, however, is a big step forward from Norway, where newspapers have not grasped that whole blog thing at all: they have them, the journalist-written ones, but one is led to believe they have them purely because they think they should. The fact that VG, Norway's biggest (tabloid) newspaper, has a column in its print version entitled 'Blog' says it all - how bloggy is that? But this is a post in itself (note that I've only looked at the national papers, not the regional and local ones).

Belam also finds many strange RSS set-ups, which is one of the things that frustrates me the most: when a paper hides its RSS-feeds or only offer incomplete feeds (more on why here).

Readers' blogs from The Telegraph
Meanwhile, in the spirit of Web 2.0, The Daily Telegraph recently unveiled My Telegraph, a readers' blog platform similar those Norwegian tabloids VG and Dagbladet have been successful with. It's an interesting development, but I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Dadblog (via Martin Stabe) here:

Why would I choose to host my blog with the Telegraph? Why would I want to make that kind of direct association between my personal acts of self-expression and another piece of media - a piece of media which comes with a whole lorryload of semantic and political baggage, a piece of media which actually represents something. It seems to me entirely logical that the Telegraph (or any media firm) would feel it has permission to go into this space, but I can’t imagine any circumstance where I personally would host my personal blog on someone else’s piece of media.

RSS? Royal Society of Surgeons?

An inspired video team brings a camera to the streets of Sutton, dubbed 'the most average town in England', to investigate to what extent most people understand RSS. The result is enlightening, though perhaps not that surprising. I know for a fact that I'd get similar results if I were to ask the same question to a number of editors (via Adam Tinworth).

How can journalists work without newsreaders?

"A very good question asked by Lost Remote. Why don’t more journalists use news readers? I would never have come across this posting if my daily routine did not start with making a mug of tea, perching it on my desk and opening NewsGator," writes Andrew Grant-Adamson. I couldn't agree more. Do check out the full post (see my previous musings on the wonders of RSS-feeds here).

Random notes on the future of media

Hugh MacLeod has 41 great notes on blogging (via Martin Stabe). I was particularly taken by this:

40. When people ask me what the future of media is, I always answer, “RSS”. Thank you, Winer & Co. Seriously.

Well, thank you MacLeod. Just looking at the practical side of it: I read so many different news outlets, blogs & MSM, that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is invaluable to me, without it I'd spend hours just 'walking' between websites several times a day. And no, offering me a subscription to breaking news or newsletters sent directly to my email doesn't do anything for me; I know the allure of data capture and all of that, but I don't want my email box spammed with newsletters and breaking news of which 70pc is irrelevant to me. Not providing RSS leaves a serious dent in a newspaper's credibility.

To my delight, I just discovered a RSS feed for DN, my favourite Norwegian paper, but so far it only seems to bring one day old news. Due to the security settings on my laptop I haven't been able to look behind its subscription walls yet, but the subscription department told me I would only find a Pdf version there, which frankly is pretty useless to me. I just want to skim the headlines in my favourite sections and read the stories I'm interested in, quick and easy please...

Börsen, the Danish financial daily, is another annoying RSS experience: at first I only found one RSS feed – all the newspaper's output or none - but on closer inspection I later found a few more, just not a feed for my favourite section (media market).

Update 16/1: No, I dont agree with all of MacLeod's notes, I certainly don't have a lot of time on my hands - that's why I shied away from blogging until about this time last year, but there are many gems among them. Jackie Danicki has picked out a few other of my favourite notes here.