|
|
|
|
| About site: Weblogs - Kristine Lowe |
Return to News
|
| About site: http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/ |
Title: Weblogs - Kristine Lowe Deals with current trends in online journalism. Also includes personal observations about life in Scandinavia.
|
| Alexa statistic for http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/ |
Please visit: http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/
|
| Related sites for http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/ |
| Morpheme_Tales Contains unpublished journalism on mainly international topics as well as in-depth discussion of other issues. | | Motiveless_Crime Commentary on pop culture, news, and politics figure. | | Notes_from_the_Newsroom Newsroom blogs from The Oklahoman. Covers the week in review, trivia, my two bits, and the weekly news quiz. | | Piercing_Pens A pair of twenty-something writer-journalists writing about current Philippine news and issues. | | Rahul_Reports Covers news, politics, sports, business and entertaintment items - with a tinge of Indianesse. | | Rebuilding_Media Journalist Vin Crosbie, Dorian Benkoil, Bob Cauthorn and professor Ben Compaine share their views on the fate of media, its misguided attempts to harness new technologies, and where it lost touch with |
|
This is best-2006.com cache of m/ as retrieved on 2010.03.13 best-2006.com's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. The page may have changed since that time.
|
var TPApp = {}; TPApp.app_uri = "http://www.typepad.com/"; Kristine Lowe Notes on the changing media landscape
Journalist, blogger, eh... media junkie blogging about everything media, interspersed with the odd report on Scandinavia's many idiosyncracies.
As self-employed I work around the clock at times, so posts here will be irregular. This blog is a personal one
Click here to read more about me.
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
@import url('http://convotrack.com/css/tab.css');
ConvoTrack  Subscribe to this blog's feed Acquisitions Ald09post Art Blogging Books BusinessModel Citizen journalism Culture Current Affairs Documentary Economy Epistemology Facebook Finance Food and Drink Free speech Freesheets Future Headlines 2007 Highlights 2006 Journalism Knowledge Libel Marketing and PR Media Mergers MySpace News Personal Pictures Privacy PublicBroadcasting Recreation RSS Second Life Seminar Social Networks SocialBookmarking SocialWeb swOslo Television Travel Trends 2008 Twitter VRM w2eb Web/Tech March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 More... Adrian Monck Astrid Meland (no) Bente Kalsnes’ blog BuzzMachine Common Sense Journalism Complete Tosh, by Neil McIntosh Dave Lee David Black Diary of a wordsmith Edward O’Hara Eirik Solheim Frilansliv (no) Gentlemen Ranters Greenslade Here’s the Kicker: James Mitchell Joanna Geary Linda Jones L’Observatoire des medias (fr) Marek Miller (pl) Martin H. Jensen (no) Martin Moore Blog Martin Stabe Media Café Polska (pl) Media Culpa Media details eu Mediefunderinger (no) New Media Trends Newspaper Innovation Norwegian affairs (no) NRKbeta: NRKs sandkasse for teknologi og nye medier One Man & His Blog Poynter Online Pål Hivand | blog Richard Burton Richard Sambrook Robin Hamman Strange Attractor: Picking out patterns in the chaos The Future of News The Inksniffer Thoughts of Nigel Undercurrent Vassa eggen (se) Wordblog Peter Warrens Finansblogg (no) 247 Wall Street A VC Stephen Kahn Trading Floor Blogging Stocks The Global Perspective CFO Blog - CFO.com Politicalbetting.com Vampus (no) Byline: Lene Johansen Johan Norberg Media Influencer Shabana Rehman The Early Days of a Better Nation Jackie Danicki Confused of Calcutta Solan's blog Brian Micklethwait The good things in life Rethink: poetry, philosophy, politics The Wardman Wire Delmer Wells Philip Young Feeling Listless Ghost of Goldwater Hjorthen uttaler seg (no) Snoens Mediekritikk (no) The Liquid Muse Knut Albert's Beer Blog DC Drinks The Pour wine blog (NYT)  Steven Wilson and Aviv Geffen: Blackfield  Steven Wilson and Aviv Geffen: Blackfield II  Gilles: Requiem  : The Best Opera Album in the World...Ever!  Pink Floyd: The Division Bell  Black AngelSavage Rose: Black Angel  David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder  Neal Stephenson: The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)  Michael Lewis: Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street  C.J. Sansom: Revelation "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" The headline quote belongs to Ida Jackson, aka Virrvarr, who told Oslo’s first Twestival last fall that this is a question she’s often met with when she talks to senior high school students in Norway about blogging.
Whereas, at least according to the last blog rankings I’ve seen, the most read UK blogs are political blogs (please correct me if I’m wrong here), in Scandinavia, the most read blogs, by far, are "glamour blogs". Mostly written by girls in their late teens and early twenties, these blogs all have a diary-like form with lots of photos – especially of shoes, make-up, clothes, accessories and/or the blogger trying out new shoes, clothes, make-up and hairstyles.
Among Norwegian teenagers this photo-based blog style is so pervasive that it is the text-based blogs that come across as weird, unusual and simply not adhering to common blogging practice.
Even among text-based blogs, I’ve seen the conception of what blogging is change with new ”generations” taking to blogging, so here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:
I’m fascinated by how the blogosphere grows and evolves and how new voices emerge and then establish themselves as thought leaders or trendsetters to new generations of bloggers. While thinking about how the blogosphere has evolved and is evolving, I’ve come to think that it makes sense to talk about generations of bloggers, as different generations often have different ideals, myths, heroes, ideas of what value blogging has.
These values are often summed up in who they see as thought leaders or trendsetters: who are the bloggers they look up to and are inspired by, who are they trying to emulate, who do they consider their peers, who do they hang out with. For the sake of clarity: I’m not saying that you should try to emulate other bloggers, but in some parts of the blogosphere it’s an accurate description of what’s going on.
For my own part, I discovered blogging in 2002 via friends who were early, and passionate bloggers. That discovery got me reading blogs and even books about blogging, but, blaming my deadlines and general lack of time, I didn’t start blogging myself until a friend set up a blog for me in September 2005, and it took me until January 2006 to really get going (my loss).
The bloggers I really admire are folks like Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Confused of Calcutta, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis - all thinking bloggers with a knack for making complex ideas sound simple, for capturing the zeitgeist in powerful and sometimes though-provoking metaphors. Not that I always agree with what they say, but I’m a big fan of the ease with which they discuss sometimes complex trends, ideas and technology and how reading them often gives me plenty of food for thought.
My friend Adriana, who kicked me into the blogosphere in the first place, can also be trusted to always give me something to chew on when she finds time to blog.
But the bloggers I read most frequently are those who blog about the issues closest to my own field of interest, such as Kevin and Suw, Adam Tinworth, Robin Hamman, Paul Bradshaw, Richard Sambrook, Martin Stabe, Alan Mutter, Robert Picard, Hans Kullin, Undercurrent, Roy Greenslade, Joanna Geary etc.
The great thing is that there is also a steady new inflow of bloggers writing well on editorial development, on media economy, on the intersection between journalism and social media, on free speech etc. – and I do of course read and find pleasure in lots of other blogs as well - including scores of Norwegian blogs and some Swedish, Danish, German and… oh well, blogs from many parts of the world.
But my references are very far from everyone’s references.
To some it’s Seth Godin , Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and other leading bloggers they look to, but often those who started blogging in 2009 will refer to blogs who emerged in 2008 or 2007, fashion blogs will have a whole different set of references, as will of course political bloggers.
I’ve always thought age is a state of mind, and with bloggers I think who they identify with, who they hang out with online, and what they’re trying to achieve is more indicative of what ”generation of bloggers” they belong to than the age of the blog or blogger. Among other things, this leads to the very obvious conclusion that how you measure if a blog is successful depends on what you set out to achieve – for instance, I would have thought I’d done something seriously wrong if I had been invited to a glam party on the basis of my blog, though to a glam blogger it would understandably be very gratifying – but there’s something much more important at work here.
What will blogging be in the future? A blog is of course only a platform, but in the part of the blogosphere I grew up there are strong implicit ethical guidelines, very clear ideas about what blogging is and isn’t, what good blogging is and isn’t.
Where do these ideas stem from? I found myself at loss when I tried to pinpoint it (in Norwegian). I could think of books and bloggers and discussions that helped shape my own ideas about this, but no one source.
There’s a whole industry that’s grown up around teaching good and/or effective blogging strategies, around advising companies on social media strategy and issues, but as new practitioners enter the arena they also bring their own, or their thought leaders’, ideas to bear on what social media and blogging is.
My point? Only that blogging, and the conception of what it is, is changing and I’m trying to find a good vocabulary to describe that change while also being fascinated by what shapes the change; what effect it has now and will have long term. What is your take on all this? Who are your thought leaders? What are your daily fixes? I’d be grateful for any input as these are questions I’ve found myself thinking a lot about recently.
More links to follow Posted by Kristine Lowe at 01:27 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Social media in enterprises: the elephant in the ecosystem This was a social media event I would have just loved to attend, but unfortunately found myself unable to - tied up with business in the wrong city, wrong country even, when it took place. Luckily, Dave Terrar blogged about the evening and summed up the different presentations - excellent lineup (part I and part II). Adriana's talk (below) offers lots of food for thought as usual.
Social Media in Enterprise Cass Biz SchoolView more presentations from Adriana Lukas. Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:07 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Circulation figures confirm the future is still online, local and in the long tail 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. Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:58 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Notes from the changing media landscape 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)" Posted by Kristine Lowe at 10:54 AM in Blogging, Freesheets, Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Time to support David Montgomery? 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. Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:58 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us On makers and managers and how to manage your time better I just found a key insight into how to manage my time better. The funny thing is that I've been adapting my schedule to these recommendations for a few years already while only operating on an inkling, a sense of how compartmentalisation might be key to balancing the many different aspects of what I do for a living.
Thing is, both in my personality and in the jobs I do there is a kind of dichotomy: I'm both a thinker and someone who gets things done, both introvert and extrovert, both a columnist and a fixer - and switching between those two modus operandi can be difficult. I wish there was some magical button I could press, but I've yet to find it (though in its absence, I've found that deadlines tend to do the trick).
This is why something really clicked into place for me when I read this article by Paul Graham on Manager's Schedule and Maker's Schedule which Adriana recommended to me recently. Tiffani Jones, a webwriter, describes the difference between the two schedules well:
Manager types are accustomed to a certain way of working. They respond quickly to emails, crisply prioritize (and eviscerate) their inboxes, plan meetings, and generally just get stuff done. Heap a pile of tasks in front of them, and they will energetically destroy that heap, come hell or high water. This describes me in my natural working state.
Things change, though, when it’s time to get creative. When writing, I need to sit for long, uninterrupted periods and think things through. I need freedom for my mind to wander toward new & better ways of phrasing a particular sentence. And I need to actually relish in the creative process, or my work will come out all crappy.
The problem is, switching from “manager” to “creative worker” can make a person crazy. If you don’t play your cards right, you end up in a scary ADD shitstorm, marooned between your inbox, Twitter, and a blank page. Ugh.
She also offers some good tips on how to manage this, do check out her full post here. The funny thing is, when I was in PR I used to get up at 4-5am to get some uninterrupted blogging time before the phone started ringing at 9am. Even when I worked as an inhouse journalist I often got up that early to get some quiet time to sift through my RSS-feeds, reflect and blog before I got into work. But now that I'm full-time self-employed I've not been by far as efficient in dividing my schedule into "writing time" and "fixing time" - and when I don't do this it leads to procastrination, general inefficiency and frustration.
It's all the more pertinent for me now that I divide my time between working as a media commentator (the creator role), journalist (can be both roles depending on the assignment) and being the head of The Norwegian Online News Association (def. a manager's role). Only last week I was working as a fixer for BBC, which resulted in this report from Norway, and I Iove that stuff.
But I also love trying to figure out, and put words to, what moves the world and what makes people tick: I live in the tension between those two states of mind and would get frustrated if I didn't find an outlet for both these sides - so I will take Paul Graham's thoughts and Tiffani Jones' advice on this to heart and start planning my weeks better. Now for some writing time... Posted by Kristine Lowe at 01:46 PM in Journalism, Personal | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us News:rewired: some of my favourite quotes Or why SEO+Journalism=Britney Spears, deskbound journalism=bad business strategy and the most successful media companies out there are just digging their graves slower than the rest.
I had a great time at Journalism.co.uk’s news:rewired last Thursday, but since there was so much excellent live coverage of the event and I’ve been busy since catching up with friends, deadlines and travel, I thought I’d just mention some of my favourite quotes here for now.
First in the session on social media for journalists, excellently moderated by Kate Day, these gems on Journalists and SEO:
Maria Bettio, search content producer at The Times, talked about how to explain search engine optimalisation (SEO) and the importance of headlines to journalists. She told the audience that when she tried to explain SEO to journalists she often found all of them just trying to insert "Britney Spears" into their headlines (!).
That interesting, and very plausible explanation of what journalists associate with SEO was only topped by a question from someone in the audience on how he could make SEO work so that Google would only send him the niche audience he wanted for his site, in this case executives with fat pay checks, not "all the regular Joes" out there....
From the last session on‘New journalism, new business models: how can journalism support itself online?’:
Chaining your journalists to their desks is simply not good for business: Ben Heald, CEO of SiftMedia: "All of our reporters are on Twitter and out and about in the community, I don’t like to see them in the office. I’m going to drive more money from my community if my reporters are known to my target audience, have been to their trade conferences, have interviewed them etc."
Change or die: Greg Hadfield, until recently head of digital media at The Telegraph, hit a nerve with some of his closing remarks, and his announcement he was leaving The Telegraph spurred many headlines. Reading the comments in the comment section on this post I’m open to how it could also have been a collection of well-picked sound bites. Still, even if that should be the case, there’s both truth and food for thought in much of this:
"There is not a dichotomy between being a journalist and being an entrepreneur, the future is small, not big media… You cannot be a good journalist now without being an entrepreneur. Journalists have to remember their connectedness to a society. That they are part of a wider network" (Adam has more on this bit).
Hadfield talked about writing a book on "digging your grave slowly":
"The really successful media companies out there are just digging their graves more slowly... The generation who have to change journalists is sitting in this room. If you don’t change, no matter how slowly you dig your grave it is still going to be your grave...
"I came into journalism to change the world – I mean, my hero is George Orwell – and ended up putting football scores into The Daily Mail. My best work was working at local newspapers,” Hadfield said, adding that he then regularly met the readers he was writing about and serving.
Oh, and I enjoyed Adam’s slideshow from the session on problem fixing I’m sorry I missed, George Brock’s opening remarks and, well, most of the day. I assume we’ll see the ultimate summary of the coverage of the day at Journalism.co.uk eventually, so I think I’ll leave it at that for now…
Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:57 PM in Journalism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us New Year: full speed ahead Okay, so I hit the year running. So far 2010 has been very busy, but in a good way. However, I had quite a few analytical posts I wanted to kick off my blog year with that I've simply kept running out of time to finish.
So this is just to break the radio silence here: welcome 2010, let's hope it'll be a good year. There's lots to say about the media year past, and the decade now behind us for that matter. I've said a bit about the key headlines here and here (in Norwegian) as a columnist, though might return with a few personal insights and highlights on my blog later.
I'm off to London in the morning as I'll be attending Journalism.co.uk's Newsrewired at City University on Thursday (I'll be in town from noon tomorrow 'til Saturday morning). I hope to see some of you there, and I'm also hoping it might be a bit warmer there than here. This photo is from Oslo harbour yesterday, a day spent filming outdoors (I was working for a TV company, the pic is snapped with my Noka N79) ... fun work, good company, but don't let the sun fool you: it was freezing...brrr...
 Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:59 PM in Personal | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us The funniest news story illustration of 2009 I bet there are lots of contenders for this category that I missed, but, seeing that my summary of the media year gone by has yet to be published, and I didn't touch on this there, here's my favourite: Why would anyone do this to a horse? Well, the horse in the photo had nothing to do with the story it was used to illustrate, about horse smuggling, so the editor thought it best to make sure nobody recognised the horse in the photo... Something to chew on for die hard ethicists? Full story in Norweigan here. Posted by Kristine Lowe at 06:36 PM in Journalism | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us The 7hr+ documentary smash hit About 1.4 million people watched Bergensbanen, a 7hr+ documentary about the 126-year-old rail line, when it was first aired late November. With the re-runs this Christmas, and the option to download it free of charge under a Creative Commons license, I imagine that number will be much higher by now (see Wired's recent story about the documentary here).
For my part, I thought it was a spectacular show, even if it "clocks is at almost 7.5hrs", as Wired put it. There was a lot of buzz on Twitter about it when it first ran, but I only had a chance to see it this Christmas.
It is a long trainraide, but it must be one of my favourite trainroutes ever, and it's fascinating to see how much the landscape change from the jagged mountains surrounding Bergen on the Westcoast, travelling over the mountain moorlands of Hardangervidda, so often covered in snow, to the soft rolling hills as you go further east and eventually end up in the citiscape of Oslo. And it's all filmed in HD, which these few shots from my most recent trip on Bergensbanen definently are not. On second thoughts: better go to Wired and download the whole documentary there, my Netbook is so slow now I won't attempt any more uploads than this, which is not really what I planned to upload.
Posted by Kristine Lowe at 06:10 PM in Documentary, Journalism, PublicBroadcasting, Television | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Once upon a blue moon Well this isn't really a blue moon, only a recent winter day with a bluish cast - but the full moon on New Year's eve will be blue, at least metaphorically speaking. However, my only reason for stating that is to have a timely excuse to post this picture: I'm all buried in deadlines right now, but had I the time I would really have loved to go exploring the wonderful winter light with a better camera than this (my Nokia N79). It's really freezing outside though, -15 degrees Celsius today and they say it'll only go colder, so perhaps it's for the better that I am holed up inside:Update 30.12.2009, 10:33 CET: Actually, I am corrected in the comments below: this is supposedly a blue moon as the photo is captured on Boxing day. With that in mind, perhaps I'll make an extra effort to get a shot of the moon tonight and tomorrow as well... Posted by Kristine Lowe at 12:04 AM in Pictures | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Happy Holidays! I was dead set on getting those Christmas cards in the post this year, then along came a nasty spell of flu and aborted most of my Christmas preparations. Ah well, Christmas, or Yule, is upon us tonight, and I guess I'll just have to save those cards for next year's snail mail - if I haven't given up on snail mail alltogether by then (last year I had very serious plans of getting those very same cards to the post office, but ended up sending my seasonal greetings via email by way of a picture card not dissimilar to the one below). And now Christmas dinner is being served here, so time to wish you all a very happy season filled with joyful celebrations!!! Photo by me from Stavern's naval base Fredriksvern. Posted by Kristine Lowe at 06:13 PM in Personal, Pictures | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Hyperlocal journalism: live in N1 or N2? Then I'm your journalist Jay Rosen's tweet about explainthis.org the other day reminded me of this interesting concept from Norwegian local newspaper Budstikka.
The paper is running ads like the one below, telling their readers which journalists to contact if they live in such and such postcode areas. The text of the ad (my hasty translation):
"Even Closer: If you live in postcodes 1380 - 1389, then I'm your journalist - get in touch with me if you have a news tip" (picture and Budstikka story tip via Anders Brenna). UK equivalent would be if you e.g live in N1 or N2 (those are just the first UK postcodes that springs to mind, there's little comparison between North-London and the area where Budstikka is based).
Update 16/12-09 11:20 CET: more on Budstikka here (in English), what the Wikipedia entry doesn't say is that the daily local, part owned by Edda Media, Mecom's Norwegian arm, has a well-deserved reputation for savy editorial innovation, particularly online. I've written more on this for Journalism.co.uk here. I do hope that saying computer programming is journalism is a real no-brainer by now (the article is from April 2008), but the last five paragraphs describes a few of Budstikka's innovative projects using mashups, databases and involving readers to create hyperlocal journalism that was an instant public hit.
 Posted by Kristine Lowe at 02:53 PM in Journalism | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Peace prize winner Obama meets the press 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 Posted by Kristine Lowe at 11:31 AM in Current Affairs, Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Daily newsmagazines and the future of print journalism 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... Posted by Kristine Lowe at 02:45 PM in Journalism, Media | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) Digg This | Save to del.icio.us Next » Stavern. Btw: had to turn on comment moderation due to this year's surge in spam "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" Social media in enterprises: the elephant in the ecosystem Circulation figures confirm the future is still online, local and in the long tail Notes from the changing media landscape Time to support David Montgomery? On makers and managers and how to manage your time better News:rewired: some of my favourite quotes New Year: full speed ahead The funniest news story illustration of 2009 The 7hr+ documentary smash hit Comments are welcome and not pre-moderated, but I reserve the right to delete comments or plugs way off the topics this blog explores. For the sake of people's ability to listen in to the conversation I prefer comments in English, but also accept Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and German. Due to the curse of trackback spam I've had to turn on trackback moderation, but all trackbacks on topic will be accepted, apologies for any delays. Michael on "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" Ernst Poulsen on "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" Kristine Lowe on "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" nicolas. on "Is your blog really a blog if it has no photos of shoes on it?" Michael on Circulation figures confirm the future is still online, local and in the long tail Kristine Lowe on Circulation figures confirm the future is still online, local and in the long tail Michael on Circulation figures confirm the future is still online, local and in the long tail Kristine on New Year: full speed ahead a_spod on New Year: full speed ahead Kristine on The funniest news story illustration of 2009 Lijit Search Mediabistro Editors Weblog Editor & Publisher (US) Press Gazette (UK) Holdthefrontpage (UK) Media Guardian Independent Media Journalism.co.uk dn.no - etter børs Propaganda (no) Kampanje (no) journalisten.no DagensMedier (no) Dagens Media (se) Resumé: Ettan (se) Journalisten.se Journalisten.dk Medier & Reklame - Business.dk MediaWatch (dk) Poynter Online Blog powered by TypePad Add me to your TypePad People list _qoptions = { tags:"typepad.core" }; _qacct="p-fcYWUmj5YbYKM"; quantserve(); |
|
| |
Deals | with | current | trends | in | online | journalism. | Also | includes | personal | observations | about | life | in | Scandinavia. |
|
http://kristinelowe.blogs.com/
Kristine Lowe 2010 March
dvd rental
dvd
Deals with current trends in online journalism. Also includes personal observations about life in Scandinavia.
Rules
|
© 2005 Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6+
|
Recommended Sites: 1.
Arts -
Business -
Computers -
Games -
Health -
Home -
Kids and Teens -
News -
Recreation -
Reference -
Regional -
Science -
Shopping -
Society -
Sports -
World
Miss Gallery
- Top Anime Hentai
- DVD rental by mail
- Jobs search - Credit Consolidation - Valentine Gifts For Him - Free Online Greeting Cards : Meme4u - Find jobs
Warning: implode(): Bad arguments. in /home/content/b/e/s/best2006/html/page.php on line 661
|
2010-03-13 15:11:27
Copyright 2006 by Rules
|
