Kristine's Web

Blogging the crash: how blogs transformed and challenged mainstream media coverage of the credit crisis

In a book published recently, I argue mainstream media's institutional constraints were both an asset and a liability when covering the events leading up to last year's financial crash.

I've been meaning to blog about this for ages, but I been covering and thinking about this issue a lot this year and have so much to say on it that, even though I was in England for the book launch recently, I keep postponing it.

One of these days I will find time to sit down and write it all up, but in the meantime Journalism.co.uk has published my contribution to the book here. This issue is particularly interesting to me because it touches on two very different, yet important, influences on my career: one is one of the world's first social media consultants, and the woman who kicked me into the blogosphere in the first place, the other was a former financial hack turned PR and one of the founding fathers of financial PR in Britain.

 ‘Playing Footsie with the FTSE?' is a a collection of 20 articles by leading journalists and academics that asks why leading financial journalists and commentators failed to predict the biggest economic crisis in 70 years:

Interview on the age of online media

To mark VG.no's best readership figures ever, I was recently invited by VG.no to comment on the age of online media in general and VG's online journalism in particular together with Jon Bing and Eirik Newth.

The journalist in question did a good job of covering the essentials, but interviews like these always feel a bit superficial because there is simply so much to say. I've written more about journalists and the social web here, and, for the Scandinavian speakers among you, at the blog I've set up for Norway's Online News Association (NONA) we write about this all the time (in Norwegian).

Now, as it happened I was chatting with my x via Gmail just when I found this interview had been published. Merlin's Dutch, but written Dutch and Norwegian have many similarities. His immediate reaction? "I just loove how they feel they have to say [in the caption] Kristine Lowe is the one in the middle":-)

 

I'm quoted on the social web in new edition of Ethics for Journalists

I get to pontificate quite a bit about journalists, citizen journalists, bloggers, ethics and the social web in the new updated version of Ethics for Journalists. It's the 2009 edition and should be available from Amazon: