Content really is king, if not on the web then at least on the mobile web.

Yes, we talk a lot about the wonders of the mobile web these days, at least I've found myself writing quite a bit about it this spring, but that link will take you to an article from 2006 which was none too optimistic about all the hype surrounding the mobile web at the time.

Admittedly, smartphones such as the iPhone has radically changed the outlook for the mobile web, but this mobile revolution has been some time in the making. When I talked to VG Multimedia's CEO Jo Christian Oterhals for a magazine feature earlier this year, he told me he attended his first conference on the mobile internet as early as 1999.

This may be partly because, as John Naughton argued in his excellent piece "Everything you need to know about the internet" this weekend, the internet's full potential to transform our lives is still unknown - it's an evolution, not an overnight revolution.

But it's also partly because our industry is full of slogans and hype, some of which never become more than pretty slogans - and yet they're still reused at regular intervals. I stumbled across the OhMyNews article I link to in the intro when I googled this quote Kevin Anderson left in comment on my post on Lorites and Longtails for more context:

"For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in the short-term as content companies struggle to make money through advertising or subscriptions. It isn't working yet, and it may not for some time....In the long run, advertising is promising."

That's Bill Gates, writing in 1996. Of course, now, as Paul Bradshaw brilliantly deconstructs, it's curation that is king. Adam Tinworth provides a top-notch analysis of this "silver bullet" mentality here, followed up by Kevin here.

I'm thinking perhaps there is a gap in the market here for a blog keeping track of all those tired slogans and debates that keeps popping up again and again when you least expect it.... In the meantime, here's Shirley Bassey and Propellerheads with "History Repeating": 

I must admit I find PDF a pretty cumbersome format, so when Paal Hivand tweeted a link to this special offer from a regional Norwegian newspaper I couldn't help but laugh: a nine (!) step guide to get the PDF version of the paper. It's a available for free for a three week trial, downloadable for roughly £2 a day or you can take out a paid subscription (it doesn't say for how much).

Now, as the newspaper serves Finnmark, Norway's sparsly populated northernmost county, there might be a business rationale to offering a PDF-paper like this, but, me, I'd happily settle for reading the newspaper online.

 

The iPad is a premium product for premium content. It’s a lean-back device most used in the evenings, and it provides a new chance for photo- and long-form journalism.

Since its launch earlier this year, the media industry has been abuzz with talk on how the iPad will change the industry. As a media journalist I’ve already attended quite a few talks, and read an extraordinary amount of articles, on the subject, but INMAs Tablet summit in Oxford this week gave me new insights into what kind of role the iPad might come to play in the media ecosystem.

Convenience or uniqueness?

That is not to say that there is a consensus about this role. For instance, The Guardian’s Jonathan Moore said his newspaper saw the iPad more as a convenience device, its iPad app offering pretty much the same content as you find on The Guardian’s news site, while the majority of the presenters saw it as the perfect device for offering unique content people were willing to pay for.

"This has to be a premium content. If you approach it as something free: let’s just turn off the light and go home. It has to be premium, paid for, from day one," said Juan Señor, Innovation in Newspapers' UK director. He asserted that we can’t talk about tablets without talking about the rest of our platforms, pointing out that you have to have different content for different platforms.

A new chance for photo- and long-form journalism

"Tablet and paper will be premium, provide background etc, while we have to see online and mobile as mass media. You will have to charge perhaps five times more for print paper and for tablets," he said, highlighting some of the newspapers Innovation in Newspapers has remade, especially the successful Portuguese daily news magazine I, as perfect journalism to be transformed to the iPad.

Media consultant and commentator Frédéric Filloux said the iPad offers a new chance for long-form journalism. In his view, it provides three major rehabilitations: 1) Re-bundling the news. Tablets and mobile can re-bundle content, 2) Visual 3) Length.

The lean-back device

"The iPad is the lean-back device: it’s a consumption device rather than a production device – it has nothing in common with a lean-forward device such as the PC," he said. Read more of his thoughts on this here. Interestingly, Jon Einar Sandvand, digital strategist at Aftenposten, Norway’s newspaper of record, said iPad readership figures suggested it was most used in the evening, between six and ten.

"Research suggests iPad will become the leading platform in terms of how much people spend consuming media on it. It is a media consumption device. If you are a mono-media operation producing second-hand stories you won’t win from iPad: garbage in, garbage out," said Juan Antonio Giner, president and founder of Innovation in Newspapers.

Now, let me confess that I often find big media conferences tend to focus too much on ideology than on how people actually are approaching a certain issue or innovation, but the Tablet Summit offered some excellent brain food in that it provided lots of insight into how different news organisations were approaching the iPad.

Among those, the most useful was the very hands-on presentation by Saulo Ribas, creative director at Brazilian Editora Globo’s "Epoca Magazine".

Useful iPad tips for publishers

His newspaper wanted to be the first in the country with an iPad app, so they built a light version first, and will launch the full version in July. He offered five useful tips for newspaper wanting to develop iPad apps:

1.It’s an app, not a magazine or something like that. We have to make the best use of the interface Apple has provided.

- Good apps are non-linear. You can access content from everywhere in the app.

- Good apps don’t require users to learn how to use it, or at least not so much. If you need instructions on how to use the app it usually means it’s poorly designed.

- Good apps have very simple information architecture. Simplify and eliminate the unnecessary.

- Good apps allow the users to leave and then come back to where he left. Try to produce the best reading experience possible.

2. Think about templates not pages. What is the role reserved for the editorial designer in the age of the tablets? If it looks awesome in the iPad it will look awesome in any other tablet.

3. Personalise: the reader is really in control. Allow the reader to define the settings of the app, the more the better. It's a big change for us because we’re very attached to our typography in our mags and papers. We have a search view. Can’t be static, people are used to search. We’ve tried to put the basic controls at the bottom of the page.

4. Technology is content. Have programmers be part of the newsroom

5. Choose the right flow of information inside the iPad app

Who controls the data?

Many industry experts have looked to the iPad as a potential saviour for the media industry. In essence, the sound bite I took away from the Tablet Summit which best answers this proposition was that yes, "there is a future life for the news industry if we reinvent, not if we just repurpose". We also have to keep an eye on who controls the data.

"I do believe Apple wants to become the world’s kiosk. We could end up like the music industry; we do need to be aware of what’s happening. They control pricing and they control customer data – and if you loose those, you loose out," said Senõr. That Apple also controls the customer data was new to me, but it was also mentioned by one of the other presenters. If that is the case, it sounds very worrying indeed.

Now, these are the ideas that still stand out for me, looking back at the conference. While I made extensive notes during the Summit, Marek Miller was doing such an excellent job of live blogging it that I thought I’d afford myself the luxury of taking some time to reflect a bit on the event before I started writing about it. I will return to a few other thoughts I took away from the event a bit later, but, if you want to read more about the individual presentations, do check Mareks excellent live blog from the event here.

This is pretty nifty: Paul Mathews, an Ericsson employee, was able to use a communication platform at the Swedish firm to enable those stranded without access to the internet to use their phones to post questions and messages to a Facebook page he'd set up to help passengers caught up in the recent flight chaos.

The text messages cost the usual rate but the user is kept up to date with replies for free thanks to the system. "The initiative is not connected to my employment but I am able to deploy the same technology that we export for external developers," he told The Local.

Mathews and his wife Helani manage the site, first set up when some US colleagues were left marooned in the Swedish capital amid the ongoing flight chaos, but he underlined that it is the users, now numbering more than 120, who keep it moving and make it it useful. Full story over at The Local.

I started writing about this issue due to my own experiences using VG.no's Hitchhiker's Central (Haikesentralen), but it's a fascinating topic. Not only because of my interest in editorial development and previous experiences from travel PR, but I really think this scenario reveals how powerful communication tools the internet offers and how out of touch too many institutions and companies are with this new communication landscape we live in.

It's not all that new of course, but the future has always been unevenly distributed and the volcano flight chaos, and subsequent transport crisis, just shows us to which extent this is the case.

In my last media report (link in Norwegian) I wrote that "If there is one arena custom-made to think big and fast at the same time, it's social media. The challenge here is that social media to a large extent is comprised of small niches and networks which could do with someone or something to connect it all together. A connection point is exactly what VG's Hitchiker Central has provided in the wake of the current transportation meltdown. But the tools to do this are so easy to use and readily available that it is far from given that this a role media will be able to occupy forever".

Mathews nifty "Stranded in Europe" Facebook page, and accompanying blog is one example of people taking matters into their own hands, and I'm sure there are plenty other, simliar examples to be found. In fact, here's another one, and I'm sure I could find other such initiatives if I did a bit of googling...

About a week after the ash cloud from Eyjafallajökull started wrecking havoc to airtravel all over Europe, The Federation of Norwegian Commercial and Service Enterprises (HSH) has launched Reishjem.no (Travel.no) in collaboration with the Norwegan foreign department.

Unveiled yesterday evening, the new website is almost identical to Schibsted-owned VG.no's Haikesentralen (Hitchhiker's Central) - dubbed a "mini craigs list" by Jeff Jarvis - but enables professional tour operators, mostly coach companies, to advertise their routes in Norway and Europe for free. The site will only be up during times of emergency such as the one we're experiencing now.

It's a useful site. It would have been much easier if I could have found a coach company with a direct route to England and seats still available when Journalism.co.uk trainer Colin Meek got stranded in Oslo last weekend than organising a private car via Haikesentralen. But isn't this too little, no routes I could have used are currently advertised there, and much too late?

I once worked as a PR for a government-owned destination marketeer so I understand why such collaborative measures take time to organise and get up and running. But this kind of institutional inertia is exactly what makes governments and big companies appear slow, incompetent and often irrelevant in today's media landscape, and that goes for many media companies too.

As Jarvis says: "What’s failing us, all in all, is our power structures, which aren’t built to think big and fast at the same time." 

Thing is, more and more of us have become accustomed to turning to our online networks when we need help or get stuck. Most of the time someone in those networks will respond instantly, or at least within the day. It will certainly not take a week before our calls for help are answered. The beauty of this is that the online tools we use to build such networks are there for governments and companies to exploit as well, and yet, almost eleven years after the blog went mainstream, too few governements and travel companies have fully done so.

As mentioned in my column this week (in Norwegian) several airline companies, such as KLM (in English), Norwegian, SAS, did make an effort to keep their passengers informed via Facebook and Twitter, and many passengers shared information that could benefit their fellow travellers here too. But it's a half-way house at best.

These tools and sites are so easy to use that there really is no excuse: one of my favourite places for travel updates during the ash cloud crisis was this Coveritlive bloog by Tnooz, which is nothing but an aggregation of travel related Twitter and newsfeeds and requires no techical know-how to set up.

However, whether we call it the internet age, age of social media, web 2.0 or what have you, the age we live in today requires a different way of thinking than when monopolithic media controlled most publishing platforms. When writing my column this week I was reminded of something Adam Tinworth once told me about how we need to move from seeing journalism as a product to seeing it as a service (in Norwegian). It would seem a bit strange, though not entirely out of sync with my own experiences, but perhaps that goes for the travel industry too?

It's the deadlines, stupid.

"Because of the pressures of news – you can’t have dead air or blank pages – so much of your focus and time spend is on today that you don’t have much time to think about tomorrow," said professor Robert Picard in a recent, in-depth interview I did with him. The interview, for this magazine, is not online, but this was one of the quotes that really stuck with me.

The question of why the media industry is so slow to adapt to change has been on my mind for many years - I mean, being flexible and thriving in the face of change were things we were taught were prerequisites for a journalism careeer as early as high school - and I have several more or less finished blog posts on this sitting on my desktop. Sadly, what was true in 2006 or 2008 is still pretty much true, and I might still return to some of my earlier unpublished musings on this later, but this quote really brings home one of the obvious issues at work.

I won't try to pretend that I'm immune to that sort of behaviour myself, though I would like to think that I've learnt from early mistakes. Take blogging for instance, in December 2002 a friend told me about "how blogs would turn the world upside down" (this was at the time of the infamous Trent Lott affair), and started reading blogs at the time, I even read books on blogging such as Cluetrain, but kept blaming my deadlines for why I couldn't possibly blog myself until a friend set up a blog for me (this blog, incidentally) in September 2005 and told me to get going. Since I soon saw my mistake in not taking up blogging sooner I've been extra careful since to pay more attention to, and get to grips with, emerging technology and trends.

But back to that Picard interview. While writing my contribution to "Playing Footsie with the FTSE? The great crash of 2008 and the crisis in journalism", I was reminded of how the media always has been much better at covering events than process and trends, and the often short term focus of the newsroom due to institutional constraints and bad planning. Could it be that even though we complain about how politicians seem unable to think further ahead than the next election, they're still masters of long term vision compared journalists who're unable to think beyond next deadline? And media executives?

"The only people who are worse than journalists when it comes to short term vision is media executives who never seem to be able to think further than the next quarter," said Picard, who didn't have much faith in journalism school on this point either: "I don’t hold my breath for journalism education because journalism professors are not the most creative types and rarely make innovation and entrepeneurialism a priority."

Still, compared to when he lectured on "The Future of News" in Oslo last year (these quotes are not from the lecture, but from my interview with him after the talk), Picard was more moderate, not quite as controversial, this year, a fact he explained by saying that media "companies are not so much in denial as last year, so I don't need to hit quite so hard to make them wake up."

Danish regional newspaper company Fynske Medier unveiled plans to invest another two million pounds (20m DK) in developing technology such as e-readers and mobile platforms this week.

The media group has already had some success selling online systems, and I'm assuming we're talking about content management systems here, to other smaller online publications, and wants to develope this side of its business further, according to Mediawatch.dk (quoting financial daily Börsen). The newspaper group even has international ambitions, though the story had me wondering if this market isn't already rather saturated? And how well is a smallish newspaper group like this positioned to compete in it?

Update 22.03.2010 09:14 CET: Not that I think it's a bad thing that media companies look for ways to diversify their business and create new sources of revenue, but this story came hot on the heels on a Guardian blog post on New York Times (NYT) and CNN trying to keep up with tech companies - with the executive editor of the former saying that NYT is as much of a tech company as a journalism company now.

Obviously, mobile techonology, smart phones, as well as the need to find new ways of making money online, has made it an imperative for media companies to either invest more in developing new products and solutions, or partner with someone who can do it for them. My point is only that a) media groups dabbling in tech development like this is not new, and the Guardian story had me wondering how much of this is just re-branding or spin; b) most of the bigger media players are rushing to grab a part of the mobile market these days and investing in in-house development; c) how well are most media companies, hampered by institutional inertia and constraints really suited to take on more agile tech start-ups?   

There's a lot of buzz around e-readers, mobile platforms, apps and architecture these days, and some of it is really, really exciting. Of course media companies have to be where their readers are, ideally also foresee where media habits are moving, but this new bonanza in the mobile market reminds me a bit about the heady start of the Danish freesheet war, of the days when all media companies had to have their own freesheet. That, of course, was great fun to cover as a journalist, it was a very colourful drama from beginning to end, but it didn't end very well for the media companies involved.

Yesterday, the 2009 circulation figures for Norwegian newspapers were published, and it was pretty much the same story as the year before, and the year before that come to think of it.

So, putting on my obsessive compulsive blogger hat, I figured I might as well stick with pretty much the same blog title as in previous years so that all media friends in ADD mode reading this post will be reminded that we’re speaking of a trend (pardon my somewhat private joke, but my sarcasm is aimed as much at myself as anybody else).

Some niche papers saw pretty decent circulation increases in 2009, though the overall picture for niche papers is more mixed than in the previous three years. Small local newspapers could also record increases, while the big regional newspapers saw circulation decrease. The worst circulation decline was reserved for national tabloids VG (7,7 per cent) and Dagbladet (14,7 per cent) – but if my memory serves me right these papers’ have seen circulation decline steadily for close to two decades now, it has certainly been the case for the last three years, and both papers now have more readers online than in print. Online is still a growth area in terms of readership, but it will be interesting to see how online ad revenues have fared in 2009 when the big media companies publish their annual results. For full details on the 2009 circulation figures, check out Kampanje or Journalisten (in Norwegian).

As for the decline experienced by the big regionals, I wonder if this is not a result of the effects of consolidation, perhaps combined with recession. The merger between the big regionals and Schibsted-owned Aftenposten has led to many of the same articles being used by all the papers, and I wonder if this has not contributed to some homes opting to keep only a national paper - and not a national and a regional as many homes used to do - especially with more households feeling the economic chill.

On Metro, Foursquare, the future of freesheets, Facebook-journalism and creative disruption.

Okay, so the headline of this post is pretty much the subtitle of this blog, but I often come across posts on interesting developments that I have limited time to blog about and know I easily will forget if I just tweet about them or save them to Delicious (I'm on Publish2 too, but Delicious is where most of my peers are, and old habits die hard). Also, I don't want to turn this blog into just a collection of links, but it's much easier to refind and return to stuff I mention here than on Delicious. In fact, one aspect I find very useful about blogging is, as I've previously described, that it works almost as a backup of my brain. So here's a few of the many interesting blog posts I've been thinking about recently.

Metro + Foursquare: following Monday's announcement of the new partnership between Metro Canada and the location-based social network Foursquare, the two most interesting posts that flashed past me was ReadWriteWeb's The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived and Mark Briggs' A Foursquare First: teaming with a news org. In the latter post, both the suggestion on how open APIs eventually will take over and the one on how mobile news services will become location specific make sense to me. See also: Foursquare for local business marketing (latter link added 12:18 CET)

Free dailies 2010: the age of the happy monopolist: "Free newspapers were one of the big stories of the noughties, and came to symbolise the primacy of ‘free’ and the imminent demise of paid-for papers." Interesting analysis from Piet Bakker, who charts the rise and fall of freesheets and outlines what conditions they thrive in.

Creative Disruption: What could Kodak have done differently? (via Adam's blog): there are, as Adam mentions, many lessons for newspaper publishers here - even in 2010.

Dan Blank: How I used Facebook to unearth a town's history (via Adam on Twitter): For short, I referred to this as Facebook-journalism in the intro, but that is probably not quite accurate. Still, what kept playing in my mind when I read this amazing story was how we could use similar techniques to create better crowd-sourced hyperlocal journalism.

When I mention hyperlocal journalism though, I also think of how I recently saw hyperlocal journalism defined as "what we did when we actually had time to go out and talk to people in our communities (or something similar, I can't remember where I read it just now).

Just looking at my own family history, the local stories I've learned about through talking to random people I've met - especially when just after I graduated I spent a few months working in a pub - I know there are so many amazing stories that go unreported and that many people are very curious, passionate and interested in local history, which Dan Blank's experiences really show. In this own words:

"I want to share a story about how Facebook is allowing me to experience my past in new and incredible ways. Here is the premise:

• I drove through my hometown (Howell, New Jersey) snapping pictures of every store, house, and landmark I could on the main road.
• I uploaded 165 photos to Facebook, and shared it for anyone to see. 
• So far, these photos have received more than 700 comments, adding stories, context, history and reactions. A variety of generations responded, some who remembered it in the 1950s and 1960s.

"What makes this remarkable is that I grew up in a faceless American suburb - full of cheap strip malls and tract housing. Almost everyone was a transplant from somewhere else, with waves of people settling there from New York, including my parents who moved from Queens... (do check out full post here)"

What should we make of the rumoured investor revolt against Mecom boss David Montgomery? My hunch is that it's nothing to cheer for.

This weekend Sunday Times ran a story on how Montgomery is facing shareholder rebellion, about a year after the failed board room coup against him. As someone who's followed the now pan-European media company since its early days I was asked if I knew what the inside story was.

In this particular case I don't, but if we look at the objections against his leadership brought forth after last year's revolt, and Mecom's continuing poor stock market performance this year, it seems to me that the man who gained a reputation as such a brutal cost-cutter durring his Mirror-days is simply not a brutal enough cost-cutter for the investors in question. 

When six Mecom directors stepped down after the failed bid to oust Montgomery last January, Mecom's continued investment in online strategy, at a time when the current economic downturn "warranted a total focus on cash generation", was cited by the disgruntled directors as a cause for concern - along with the accountability of the chairman and the chief executive to the board.

And let's face it: some people, like ex-Mecom director and ex-Wegener Chairman Jan Houwert, must have lost a lot of money on Mecom, while few of the once so optimistic prospects for profit margins have been met. But in today's market, investing in the online future seems like the only sensible thing to do, and not doing so could easily turn out to be suicidal.

It must also be said that we've seen some really good mashups, online ventures and agenda-setting computer assisted reporting (e.g as I've described here) from former Orkla Media - the Norwegian, Danish and Polish media group bought by Mecom in 2006 - under Mecom. Some of these look promising from a commercial point of view as well, but if the company overall has been and is making the right online investments remains to be seen.

I'm in two minds about the decision to invest in another costly proprietorial content management system (CMS) in Norway for instance, especially with Mecom's Danish arm on the face of it doing well with free open-source CMS Drupal, but that's partly because I personally perfer Drupal to most proprietorial CMS's I've worked in. It's many years since I've worked in the chosen CMS, Polopoply, though, and it might e.g have advantages to Drupal when it comes charging people securely online.

It's also interesting to contemplate what kind of CEO the rebellious shareholders would like to replace Montgomery with, and what kind of spin they could put on it. I can think of a few, but even though Montgomery is hated by many who remember him wielding the axe in his Mirror days, in this instant even Mecom's employee representatives, at least in Norway, are on his side.

"The media industry is going through a turbulent time, so stability is key... You can say what you want about Montgomery but at least he represents a line we eventually are following, which means we know what to expect," Jan-Erik Schau, an employee representative in Edda Media, Mecom's Norwegian arm, told a colleague.

If nothing else, this rumoured rebellion will probably mean we'll see a lot more positive news coming out of Mecom, after what's almost amounted to radio silence in the latter half of 2009 (following a lot of negative press last spring when it was struggling to renegotiate its banking covenants and seemed to be tethering on the brink of bankruptcy). What do you think?

Update 27.01.10 11:55 CET: Börsen, the Danish financial daily, reports today that according to anonymous sources familiar with the situation, Mecom shareholders are disappointed by how the share price have not improved more despite the capital injection this spring and the general upswing enjoyed by UK media shares in the latter half of 2009. A continuing concern over the debt level - which last year's "rebels" explicitly denied was a concern - and how Montgomery is said to have signalled an interest in further acquisitons, was also cited as worrisome.

Much of the media speculation ahead of Obama's flying visit to Norway today has centered on what the one question he has said he will take from Norwegian press will be. And the question is:

Annette Groth, The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK): "Giving the peace prize to you has been described as premature, how can you use the prize to fulfill its intentions and counter that criticism?"

Obama reminds us that, as he said when he received it, the prize came as a complete surprise to him and others might have deserved it better, but says he will use the prize to address climate change, terrorism and a whole host of initiatives. The goal is not to win a popularity contest, but to help further America's goals, he asserts. He concludes that if he's successful the criticism will die down, if he's not successful in those tasks no awards can hide it.

The one question US press was allowed to ask, of course, turned out to really be three in one...

Much has been made of how Obama has cut his visit to Norway very short, snubbed a lunch invitation from the Norwegian king and declined to attend some of the functions the peace prize winner traditionally attends, but I'm not too surprised given how contentious, and in some respects awkward, this year's prize is - not at least in the US. In a talk after meeting the Norwegian prime minister Obama blamed all the work he had to do back in DC before the year comes to an end for having to cut his Oslo-visit so short.

Still, it's been rather amusing to follow the speculation among Norwegian journalists and Twitterati on Twitter as to what the one question would and should be...

Update 10/12-09 15:30 CET: See also John Einar Sandvand: How Norwegian news sites covered the Nobel peace prize cermony

Reporting is now a commdity, but journalism isn't - what implications does that have for print?

In the excellent post I mention in the intro, George F. Snell concludes: "If newspapers and magazines want to survive they should focus on journalism and leave the reporting to the web." He draws a sharp distinction between journalism and reporting and argues that the web has made reporting into a commodity (do check out the full post).

I think this is a very useful prism to see the strenghts and weaknesses of print and web through. I don't agree that bloggers can't do journalism though. If we are to use Snell's definitions of journalism and reporting, I think some bloggers at times do better journalism than paid journalists because mainstream media, and especially news sites, focus too much of their resources on reporting (update 10/12: for more on bloggers and journalism, see e.g  my contribution to "Playing Footsie with the FTS?").

But today's overcrowded marketplace and tough financial conditions challenges media organisations to look very closely at how they can add unique value, and Snell offers an excellent prism to see recent print innovations through. 

A few days ago Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet relaunched its Sunday edition in what can best be described as magazine format:

I wasn't too impressed because it read like a smaller and thinner version of the same old Dagbladet. I'll probably still buy it from time to time, weekends being just about the only time of the week I still buy newspapers (that and when I'm travelling and short on laptop battery-time), but I would have been much more impressed if it came out looking something like this:

I must admit I shamelessly nicked this photo of Portugees daily newsmagazine I from Mark Hamilton post about it. This is a post I've been wanting to blog about for some time as Mark offers a really interesting review of "I". It's not so much the format that captures my imagination, though it seems to fit the content well, as the fact that it promises serious journalism that would satisfy Snell's definition - and it is def. something I would consider an attractive buy.

Not every day though. There's no way I could fit a daily newsmagazine into my daily routine, I've got more than enough with keeping up with my hundreds of RSS-feeds during the week, but it would be perfect for the slower pace of the weekend.

Incidentally, the newsmagazine might also be the direction Mecom is considering to take its newspapers in. The company is launching a pilot project in two of its Norwegian regional newspapers where these are to focus on stories rather than channels, and resources are to be divided 50/50 between print and online. The pilot-project is inspired by Danish media company Nordjydske Medier's "fully integrated" multimedia model, and we could see Mecom's pilot newspapers focus more on storytelling and analysis in print and more on news reporting online. It will be interesting to see how it works out...

Mecom-owned regional Sandefjord's Blad is not the only media organisation currently searching for ways to grade its journalists. Media site Kampanje reports today that Norwegian magazine group Hjemmet Mortensen is about to embark upon a new project for measuring staff productivity.

Under the new scheme, journalists and subs will be expected to produce at least six pages of editorial content per week each. Now, I don't know it only producing five pages or less will be a firing offense, that just sounds to me like a logical conclusion.

The father of the journalist union's Hjemmet Mortensen chapel is quoted in the article (in Norwegian) saying that it's obviously much easier to measure productivity in a food factory, and that it would be a shame if this new regime will lead to journalists opting for "easier" stories to satisfy the new productivity demands. In contrast to Sandefjord's Blad though, I am told the magazine group already has a regime in place to measure quality.

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 that of 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 as a whole. 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...

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).

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...

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.

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).

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).

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.