A group of PR Bloggers is organising an online PR week to be held in July. The purpose of the week is to focus on some key issues and attract attention to the emerging role of PR bloggers in developing and spreading knowledge about public relations. Often decried as a secretive profession we want to share our knowledge with everyone and encourage a better understanding of the contribution we make to our societies.

Trevor Cook, who publishes the Corporate Engagement blog from Australia, is the mastermind behind a week of PR debate being hosted by twenty PR bloggers around the globe.

I will be participating if I can get the logistics to work. I will be offline during the first part of the week.

Program: Draft as of May 26 (more info on the New PR Wiki)

MONDAY 12 JULY – PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism
Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing Jay Rosen, Chair, NYU Department of Journalism, author of the Pressthink weblog (confirmed)
Trevor Cook (Corporate Engagement)
Ryan May (Minnesota Public Relations Blog)

TUESDAY 13 JULY – Corporate Blogging
Jeremy Wright (Ensight)
Trudy Schuett (WOLves) How Business, Governments and Non-profits can use blogs to communicate with the public
Roland Tanglao (Streamline)
Hans Kullin (Media Culpa)
Todd Sattersten (A Penny For...) and (800-CEO-READ Blog.)
Wayne Hurlbert (Blog Business World)

WEDNESDAY 14 JULY – Making PR Work: Creativity and Strategy
Elizabeth Albrycht (CorporatePR) – Corporate PR – Practical strategies
Alice Marshall (Technoflak) – Media relations issues – including pitching small businesses to editors
Bernard Goldbach (Irish Eyes) – Promoting client messages through blogs
Mike Manuel (Media Guerrilla) – Micro media measurement
Angelo Fernando (Hoi Polloi) – Impact of blogs on PR and Marcomms
Anthony V Parcero, (eKetchum Digital Media Group) - Developing interactive PR strategies

THURSDAY 15 JULY – Crisis Management
Jim Horton (Online PR)
Kevin Dugan (Strategic PR) – On the Martha Stewart case
Colin McKay (Canuckflack)
Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book We the Media

FRIDAY 16 JULY – The State of the PR Profession
Richard Bailey (PR Studies)
Robb Hecht (PR Machine)
Tom Murphy (PR Opinions)
Philip Young (Mediations) – Ethics in PR

One of the reasons I started blogging was that I thought this would be an interesting way of communicating for the company I work for. But it has been hard to find really good examples of corporate blogs.

So I found this article to be a good reading for would-be corporate bloggers. Clickz.com writes about Symmetricom, the world's leading provider of atomic clocks, and precision devices and equipment. They use blogs to keep in touch with a decentralized sales force that includes 325 representatives and distributors scattered throughout the world.

Jeanne Hopkins, Symmetricom's senior manager of e-marketing and transactional sales channels says: "My boss now says it's the most fantastic sales tool he has ever seen implemented in an organization. And people in the field tell us they feel more connected to the company -- and in the know."

Online Journalism Review reports about blogger Robert Cox who tried to get The New York Times to get a correction in the paper. He tried everything, but in the end, it was his parody of the Times' correction page - and the overreaction from the Times' legal department - that got the newspaper to change its policy.

Link via Dan Gillmor.

The New York Times today had a healthy and unusual article (free registration required) about its own coverage of the Iraq war.

"Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge."

Some parts of the coverage the paper is not happy with, and that includes for example trusting sources like Ahmad Chalabi or people close to him.

"The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks."

A sample of the coverage is online at nytimes.com/critique.

I was reading this post on Whatsnextblog about how disgruntled former employees use the internet for revenge. A few minutes later I stumbled onto this website, saabdisaster.com, which is a blog that was "created because Saab Sweden and it’s agent in South Africa are having big problems for the last six months, and we, Saab owners, are the victims of that!" There seems to be at least 17 Saab owners committed to the blog and they claim to have had 9000 visitors during the last week.

The initial reaction is of course that this is a public relations disaster for Saab in South Africa, but because of the viral nature of blogs, these things have a tendency to spread. One post was made on the subject in a discussion forum at UK Saab owners club and traditional media reported about the site too. One wonders if Saab has a strategy in place to monitor if and how this spreads through the blogosphere?

For the record I have a Saab 9-5 and I'm very satisfied with it, but then again, I'm not in South Africa.

Being born and raised in Trollhättan, the location of Saab's world headquarters, I found this article from The New York Times to be interesting (free registration required). It is about the assimilation of the Saab brand into the GM family.

Link via Branding Blog.

MTV Networks will start a 24-hour cable television network in February targeting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender viewers. The channel will be called LOGO and aired in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

This is an entertaining piece about Michael Jackson's spokeswoman Raymone K. Bain, who sent out a press release stating that Jackson is not dead.

A prominent Hollywood publicist regards Bain's prolific output with shock and awe.

"When you have a client who is clearly three sandwiches short of a picnic, you need to protect him with grace and dignity," this publicist told me. "And a press release that announces to the world that your client is not dead certainly reinforces the notion that he's a total nutbar."

Link via PR Fuel.

As a result of investigative journalism, a story broke last week that US agents operated on Swedish soil, when they assisted in the extradition of two Egyptian citizens, sending them into possible torture in Egypt.

"The two prisoners have their clothes cut from their bodies by scissors, without their hand- and footcuffs being loosened. The naked and chained prisoners have a suppository of unknown kind inserted into their anus, and diapers are put on them. They are forcibly dressed in dark overalls. Their hands and feet are chained to a specially designed harness. On the plane, both men are blindfolded and hooded. The plane takes off at 21.49 and sets course towards Egypt"

The thought in itself that foreign agents are operating in our country, and on top of that they are allegedly torturing people who in fact have not been convicted for any crime, is revolting. But the story has not taken off. Media have so far mostly reported on news agency material, stating comments from the Swedish Minister for Justice, Tomas Bodström who says that "the law does not need to be changed as a result of the extradition. To the contrary, we have to get used to having foreign agents operating in Sweden". So why are media letting the responsible people get away with this? Are we happy with the fact that US agents can come flying in to our country in a Gulfstream, handcuffing people, stripping them naked and inserting suppositories in their rear ends? I know that the neutrality of this country has been a joke for decades, but I still believe in that illusion.

Journalist Ulf Nilsson of Expressen summarizes it like this (in Swedish).

"If Sweden had been USA, you would have seen [Prime Minister Göran] Persson on tv today or at least [Foreign Minister] Laila Freivalds or Tomas Bodström. They would NOT have it easy. To the contrary, smart and sharp journalists would have grilled them mercilessly about the biggest scandal in Sweden since the assasination of Anna Lindh...If Sweden had been USA, all serious TV channels would have had discussions this Sunday...Who knew what about the torture? Who is responsible? Who should be fired? ... Swedish governments and other official bodies have lied to the people for decades and always got away with it. Compared to USA or England or even France, Sweden is a closed society, quiet and compliant. Journalists make deals with people in power and don't give a damn about the fact that they are paid to serve viewers, readers and listeners."

It seems that Anders Kempe and Anders Lindberg of JKL were right on target with their post about the Swedish media needing to be challenged. We want to know if this operation has been sanctioned by the Prime Minister and if it was a trade off for having the Swede in Guantanamo relased. What was discussed when Göran Persson recently met George W. Bush?

The story has had some international circulation, for example here and here.

But sadly, the internationally most distributed story including Sweden the last few days has been this story about an elk that stole a bicycle.

Every American politician that hasn't been asleep for the last 12 months has a blog. Former Danish Prime Minister Paul Nyrup Rasmussen has two, one of his own and a Euroblog for the Euro Election Campaign. The Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi has a blog.

So what happened to the once great IT nation Sweden? Did the dotcom bust hit us so bad we're still unable to get up and try new stuff? It is really surprising that no Swedish politicians has found the blog medium yet (at least to my knowledge, I might add). The Swedish Trade Union Confederation has just started off a blog project with 7 young people having one blog each (typical but understandable that they choose to experiment with a younger audience), but in the first four weeks they have not been able to come up with more than 20 posts in total, so it's not that impressing. Sure there have been blogs about politics, like the election blog in 2002, but that was initiated by a consulting company called Oops AB and not run by any party or organisation.

Jan Emanuel Johansson supposedly used blogs in 2002 to get elected, but his homepage has no blog today and it has not been updated since June 2003. Since there is an election to the European Parliament on June 13, one would have expected at least one or two blogs to pop up. If you know of one, please enlighten me with a comment.

UPDATE: Fredrik Wackå informed me about Anna-Maria Linqvist Arrue who is a social democratic candidate for the European Parliament, with her own blog.

I guess the people at the Apple advertising departement are not amused by this poster impersonating an iPod ad, but I found it rather clever.

The copy reads: iRaq - 10,000 Volts volts in your pocket, guilty or innocent.

More on Gizmodo.

Today might be a small landmark in the short history of Swedish corporate blogging. This has to be the first example in Sweden, where a post in a corporate blog finds its way into mainstream media (both entries in Swedish only, but see my comment in a recent post). Anders Kempe and Anders Lindberg at PR agency JKL comments on the state of Swedish media, and it got picked up by the political chief editor of Svenska Dagbladet (large Swedish daily).

Congrats to Billy McCormac (who I will have the pleasure of meeting on Wednesday, in real life...) of JKL who is one of the driving forces behind their pioneering corporate blog.

President Bush has installed more than 100 top officials who were once lobbyists, attorneys or spokespeople for the industries they oversee, according to an article in the Denver Post.

In at least 20 cases, those former industry advocates have helped their agencies write, shape or push for policy shifts that benefit their former industries. They knew which changes to make because they had pushed for them as industry advocates.

The Washington Post has a story (free registration required) about how PR gurus spin news for big bucks in the UK, which touches trend number 8 in my post from yesterday.

The US journalist survey I mentioned in yesterday's post, has now been published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

It shows that journalists (66% nationally and 57% locally) think "increased bottom line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage."

They report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.

Advertiser and corporate interference with the news content are similarly high among those who work in online news, where the line between independently produced content and advertising may be harder to detect.

More journalists than five years ago think the Internet is making journalism better. Yet, the Internet is the most likely place in journalism to be suffering staff cuts (62%).

Journalists - especially national journalists - are more likely than in the past to describe themselves as liberal (will we see this "fact" be used in the election campaign by the Bush posse?).

Journalism.org has published its annual report on American journalism. They identify eight overarching trends that shape news media in 2004 and I added a comment on the implications for public relations.

1. A growing number of news outlets are chasing relatively static or even shrinking audiences for news. One result of this is that most sectors of the news media are losing audience. The only sectors seeing general audience growth today are online, ethnic and alternative media.

PR activities should focus more on online and alternative media.

2. Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom, both in terms of staff and in the time they have to gather and report the news.

Increasing opportunities for PR practitioners who position themselves as resources for journalists. Help them do their job and you will be rewarded.

3. In many parts of the news media, we are increasingly getting the raw elements of news as the end product. This is particularly true in the newer, 24-hour media. In cable and online, there is a tendency toward a jumbled, chaotic, partial quality in some reports, without much synthesis or even the ordering of the information. There is also a great deal of effort, particularly on cable news, that is put into delivering essentially the same news repetitively without any meaningful updating.

PR need to pay increasing attention on crisis management. With less time to quality check, faster speed and more media running after the same ball, risks increase and their effect increases too.

4. Journalistic standards now vary even inside a single news organization. Companies are trying to reassemble and deliver to advertisers a mass audience for news not in one place, but across different programs, products and platforms. To do so, some are varying their news agenda, their rules on separating advertising from news and even their ethical standards. What will air on an MSNBC talk show on cable might not meet the standards of NBC News on broadcast, and the way that advertising intermingles with news stories on many newspaper Web sites would never be allowed in print. Even the way a television network treats news on a prime time magazine versus a morning show or evening newscast can vary widely.

PR practitioners need to be updated on what news and pitches are welcome in what media, and when it is inappropriate.

5. Without investing in building new audiences, the long-term outlook for many traditional news outlets seems problematic. Many traditional media are maintaining their profitability by focusing on costs, including cutting back in their newsrooms. Our study shows general increases in journalist workload, declines in numbers of reporters, shrinking space in newscasts to make more room for ads and promotions, and in various ways that are measurable, thinning the product.

With less space for news, less pitches will be successful. And with a decreasing audience for mainstream media, PR practitioners need to look to alternative media with pitches, or to bypass media altogether via for example corporate blogs. On the other hand, the increasing advertising clutter, serves as an argument for shifting ad dollars to PR dollars as advertising effectiveness decreases.

6. Convergence seems more inevitable and potentially less threatening to journalists than it may have seemed a few years ago. At least for now, online journalism appears to be leading more to convergence with older media rather than replacement of it. When audience trends are examined closely, one cannot escape the sense that the nation is heading toward a situation, especially at the national level, in which institutions that were once in different media, such as CBS and The Washington Post, will be direct competitors on a single primary field of battle - online. The idea that the medium is the message increasingly will be passé. This is an exciting possibility that offers the potential of new audiences, new ways of storytelling, more immediacy and more citizen involvement.

News outlets will find new ways of distributing content, many of them online. PR practitioners must follow this development and take note on who issuccessfull in establishing an audience. Perhaps also with the rise of journalist blogs, star journalists increasingly will become their own media and less dependent on their employer.

7. The biggest question may not be technological but economic. While journalistically online appears to represent opportunity for old media rather than simply cannibalization, the bigger issue may be financial. If online proves to be a less useful medium for subscription fees or advertising, will it provide as strong an economic foundation for newsgathering as television and newspapers have? If not, the move to the Web may lead to a general decline in the scope and quality of American journalism, not because the medium isn't suited for news, but because it isn't suited to the kind of profits that underwrite newsgathering.

If online media have trouble with financing, they need to develop new ways of gathering news information that are not as costly and PR practitioners need to pay attention to how news stories reaches online media and if they can participate in the making of news.

8. Those who would manipulate the press and public appear to be gaining leverage over the journalists who cover them. Several factors point in this direction. One is simple supply and demand. As more outlets compete for their information, it becomes a seller's market for information. Another is workload. The content analysis of the 24-hour-news outlets suggests that their stories contain fewer sources. The increased leverage enjoyed by news sources has already encouraged a new kind of checkbook journalism, as seen in the television networks efforts to try to get interviews with Michael Jackson and Jessica Lynch, the soldier whose treatment while in captivity in Iraq was exaggerated in many accounts.

Combine seller’s market for information with less and less space for news. The result for PR pros? Either you’re in, or you’re out. If you are not an expert or a market leader you will find it harder to get publicity in mainstream media. Can we imagine more focus on thought leadership, personal branding and third party endorsements from the PR industry?


A journalist survey will be available here at 4 PM today.

Politicalmoneyline.com has compiled a list of the industries that spent most on federal lobbying in the US the second half of 2003. The top three sectors are:

1. Health Care $138,280,126
2. Finance, Insurance $124,222,095
3. Communication, Technology $111,600,286

According to Wired, the RIAA is behind many of the lobbying efforts for the technology and communications industry due to new legislation on copyright of digital content.

PRWEEK.COM has an interesting Q&A with Nick Denton of Gawker Media about how blogs influence the public relations profession.

Conglomeration, consolidation, corporatism and infotainment journalism prevents vital information from reaching citizens in favour of trivia and issues that serve the agenda of corporate powers. Big media threatens the few non-commercial voices, i.e. public service, that still don’t suffer from bottom line myopia and metrofication (short shallow news in contrast to investigative reporting, like the model of international free paper Metro). The result is a vanishing debate in society and a status quo in political regimes on both sides of the pond. This is, in short, the situation at the moment if you listen to some influential commentators. The solution? An extreme media makeover?

Pontus Schultz, journalist and media debater at web publication DagensPS.se reflects on a debate he participated in the other day, where Eva Hamilton, potentially a coming leader of Swedish public service channels SVT voiced her worries over the threats against public service television. ”Public service has never been under such an attack as now”, she meant, not only referring to political pressure on SVT’s role model BBC. She also pointed at coordinated attacks on EU-level from the commercial interests that want to limit the space for public service, on programming level and regarding what possibilities public service should have in the new media arena.

At the same time Anders Kempe and Anders Lindberg at PR agency JKL argues that Swedish media needs to be challenged more and that Sweden has turned into a one party state (sound familiar?) where few dare to challenge the ruling social democratic regime and their followers. With the same party in charge 21 of the last 24 years, everyone pretty much assumes a leftist government win also in 2006. It costs more and more for those who have opposing opinions and the tendency by corporations is to nurture relations with the ruling crowd instead of focusing on opinion building, minimizing the debate in society down to a minimum. Few dare to challenge the powers of leading politicians and media.

Or as Amy Goodman put it when she spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about what she sees as the corruption of mainstream media.

In your book, you fault the media for asking softball questions in return for access to those in power.
Right. We call it the ‘access of evil’: Trading truth for access.

David Neiwert, a freelance journalist based in Seattle runs a blog called Orcinus, where he not only analyses the problems of journalism today, but also suggest a solution - a media revolt manifesto (please read this post, it's very long but it's worth it). He claims that media is not fulfilling its obligations today. Conglomeration and infotainment journalism prevents vital information from reaching citizens.

”Conglomeration and the increasing grip of monolithic corporatism has reduced the diversity of voices and viewpoints that are available to the public at all levels, from small local papers to major networks.”

His suggestion for a counter attack on media is summarized in a Media Revolt Manifesto. Interestingly he points to blogs as a means of shifting the power balance and increase diversity.

”But we have to get organized. And after years of wandering in the
wilderness, I believe that 2004 is the year to make it happen -- if for no other reason than that the stakes are so high.

The main reason, though, is that I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach. And the chief tool is the Internet, the
blogosphere in particular.

Blogs represent, in fact, the real democratization of journalism, which traditionally has always been about the work of keeping the public duly and properly informed. Stories and vital facts now no longer need go through the New York Times and NBC News in order to gain wide distribution. Blogs can effectively reach as many people as several large city dailies combined. And the network of their combined efforts represents a massive shift of data around the traditional media filters.

Blogs can also be terrific means for organizing, particularly for putting together a concerted response to political and media atrocities. One need only survey the ability of blogs to affect real-world politics -- their role in bringing about the fall of Trent Lott was just a start -- to understand that their power can readily extend to reshaping the media, since they represent in themselves a kind of citizens' solution to needed reforms in the media.”

He continues:

“Blogs, in other words, can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behaviour and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.”

I'm not convinced that journalists agree with all this. Nevertheless, that’s a huge responsibility. Are we ready to bring the power back to the people, or do we rather lean back in the sofa in front of the latest reality show?

Think that donating your product will give you publicity? Well if you are Lamborghini, it sure will. From now on the police in Calabria in the south of Italy will be chasing speeders in a 500 horse power, 300 km/h Lamborghini Gallardo, according to a press release (link via Ny Teknik).

The car was donated by the Lamborghini factory in Sant'Agata Bolognese in honor of the state police 152nd anniversary and comes with among other things, a handy on-board satellite navigation and defibrillator equipment.

Overstated has an interesting overview of how many times the word blog or weblog has been mentioned in media. There has been a significant increase in coverage since early 2003.

I touched on this in a previous post, when I looked at the situation in Sweden. I performed the same search again (but this time excluded the brand names Weblogic and Weblogistics) for the search terms "blog*" and "weblog*" in Swedish media via Retriever (searches web based sources only). In Sweden, the coverage started to take off in November of 2003. Noteworthy is that in my previous analysis I found that IT and technology trade press almost made up two thirds of all articles, while marketing and journalism press had almost none.



The first Swedish mention I found was from a two year old unsigned article in Ny Teknik (New Technology) on May 2, 2002, explaining the new acronym "blog".

Link via Corporate Engagement.

The Ministry of Justice in Sweden stole articles from the paper Riksdag & Departement (Parliament & Departement), writes Journalisten, the paper of The Swedish Union of Journalists. The articles were put up on the Ministry of Justice web page by a civil servant who thought the paper was an official organ of the Swedish government and that copyright was not applicable. But R & D is an independent publication and the journalists have their own copyright agreements with the editor.

R & D often is mistaken for a government publication, which upsets the editorial staff.

- It is a label that we are trying to get rid of, says reporter Staffan Thulin.

On R & D’s web page they clearly state that all material is copyright protected, but it seems that the paper is trying to look like an official publication. R & D labels itself ”Political journal from the Parliament, the Government and EU” and all journalists have email addresses with the domain name “riksdagen.se” which is the domain of the Swedish Parliament.

Media Week has a good article about great branding mistakes, although the one with a Swedish connection, namely the infamous Boo.com I would not categorize as a branding or advertising failure. Rather it was a business idea that had no connection to reality. That, and hubris.


Link via adland.

Welcome to the first, highly non-scientific PR blog World Championships. The number of PR blogs are increasing and some of them are becoming real institutions in PR blogland. I decided to have a look at which PR blog is the most influential (I know wich ones I like to read but what about every body else?) by simply counting the links via Technorati. Yes, I know it is not a very good research method, but it's fun. File it under blog PR stunts. I thought this was equally as interesting as MarketingSherpa Blog Awards which only lists 6 PR blogs.

And the winner is - [drums please] - Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion, of course. There are a total of 286 links from 61 sources to his blog, and admit it, you read it too. Runner up is Tom Murphy at PR Opinions with 112 links from 78 sources.

The 28 most influential PR blogs (apologies if I have missed some):

1. Micro Persuasion 286
2. PR Opinions 112
3. Corporate Engagement 101
4. Corporate PR 51
5. PR meets WWW 35
6. PR Fuel 33
7. Pop! PR 31
8. PR Machine 29
9. Strategic Public Relations 29
10. Engage 25
11. PR Communications 24
12. PR Studies 22
13. Minnesota PR 22
14. Canuckflack 21
15. Marc Snyder 20
16. B.L. Ochman 20
17. Media Culpa 19
18. A PR guru's musings 18
19. JKL blog 15
20. Media Guerilla 12
21. Ravabete Omoomi 11
22. Technoflak 9
23. Mark My Words 8
24. Hoi Polloi 7
25. Kitablog 6
26. Mediations 6
27. Media Map blog 3
28. CommLog 2

I was almost Slashdotted (or in my case "Scripted") the other day. When checking the stats for my blog I noticed three times as many visitors on May 11 (about 180 page visits) than on a normal day, which I found odd, especially since I hadn't posted anything that day. When going through the referring links I found a post from Scripting News which I later realized is an established blog, even ranked #17 on Technorati Top 100. It's really silly, but seeing that your blog actually has an audience is quite an ego booster.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of Center for Media and Democracy (and PR Watch), authors of for example Toxic Sludge is Good For You and Weapons of Mass Deception, are launching a new book on May 24, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State. This book should be a must read for anyone in the "perception management" business.


You can still contribute to the project via the website Banana Republicans, which comes in a neat wiki format.

MarketingSherpa has started a poll for their blog awards for blogs about PR, B2B marketing, online marketing etc. You can either vote for the nominated blogs or suggest one yourself at the bottom of the page.

Via Canuckflack.

More and more news sites are offering RSS feeds. Reuters now offers RSS feeds for at least 12 different channels. Here in Sweden the adoption rate is slow. The news sites I know have started RSS feeds so far are:

Dagens Nyheter (daily)
Expressen (tabloid)
Ny Teknik (technology trade publication)
Svenska Dagbladet (daily)
Sydvenska Dagbladet (daily)
Yelah.net ("radical digital news")

I don't know the reasons behind the small number of Swedish sites that offer RSS, but one thing for sure is that resistance is futile. With the help of myRSS anyone can build an RSS feed for any site, for free. I've tried to create a few channels of my own, and it actually works. Not on all sites, but on some. I'm not technologically savvy enough to determine what the trouble is, but it's a little like when you create your own channels with Avantgo for your PDA. You have to pick a page that contains frequently updated items, like the press room if you want to monitor a competitor's site.

One disturbing factor is the delay between clicking on a headline (I use Bloglines) and the actual news item or post (see graphic). But you can get around that by sponsoring the specific channel (more details on their home page). So if you are really eager to get an RSS feed for a specific site, now you can.

Last week Italian TV channel RAI lost two leading profiles that resigned in protest of Silvio Berlusconi's increasingly strong grip on Italian media. The chairman of the board at RAI, Lucia Annunziata, said that RAI had become a "mailbox for Berlusconi's demands".

Accordingly, Italy now drops in Freedom House's press freedom rankings. For the first time since 1988 a Western European country apart from Turkey is now ranked "partly free". The press in all countries in Western Europe apart from Italy and Turkey are considered "free".

Link via Phil's Place.

The PR blogosphere is expanding further. Two new blogs have been brought to my attention. Angelo Fernando has a blog called Hoi Polloi, about "Marketing, Communications, Media, and PR in a post-Cluetrain world."

Fredrik Wackå is a communications consultant at W PR & Information AB and he introduced their corporate PR blog (in Swedish only) to me.

Citroën is running a tv commercial in Sweden for its C5 model with references to the new rules that allow Swedes to import larger volumes of beer. The C5 carries 49 cases of beer, 4 more than the competing model Volvo V70.

Problem is, that if someone would actually fill his car with 49 cases of beer, the would run the risk of being fined for exceeding the maximum weight the car is allowed to take, with 200 kilos.

The reporter at Resumé asks the Account Manager at ad agency Euro RSCG: "did you think about that?".

Ad guy: "Yes, of course we did".

Seems like they took a calculated risk.

The launch of free newspaper Metro’s New York edition yesterday was commented on some places, for example here. It might seem as a tough task for a Swedish newspaper to establish itself in New York, and it probably will be. But I wouldn’t underestimate these people, they have proved that they are able to challenge monopolistic and oligopolistic markets before. Metro was born with the help of Jan Stenbeck, a man (sadly passed away last year) who among other things introduced commercial TV in Sweden via its channel TV3 in the 80’s.

B.L Ochman comments: "It'll be harder to get the target audience to actually read the paper. Young people don't ignore newspapers because they cost 50 cents or a dollar. They ignore them because they prefer to get their news online or on TV. They want to skip the ads and they only want to follow news topics that affect them personally." I respectfully disagree.

Having seen the development of Metro live, I moved to Stockholm in 1995 when it was launched, I admit I was skeptical at first. The short summaries of news agency material are not news, was a common reaction. But Metro found a niche that it exploited successfully. The “metrofication” of news has just accelerated since then and a lot of people who previously didn’t read papers, now read Metro. Since the birth of internet, people are more and more getting used to not paying for information which has paved the way for free newspapers. And since it is handed out in the subway, you might as well take one. It's designed to last as long as your subway ride and why not grab a paper instead of trying not to look at the guy in the seat in front of you?

Another trend is what Trendsetters call “time compression”. People get more and more stressed and try to fit in more things in their lives. No one has time to watch TV movies or follow long TV series anymore, they're too busy. Speed dating is just another example. The quote from Ellen DeGeneres: “I’m late for yoga, hurry” brilliantly illustrates how our lives are metroficated, cut up in small shallow pieces.

Depth is out. Speed is in. Metro fits right into that picture. Whether New Yorkers agree is yet to be seen, but I can’t see why it should be any different from London, Paris or HongKong.

Free newspaper Metro today launches its New York edition. The Swedish paper is already distributed in Philadelphia and Boston. With the added NY circulation of 300,000 copies, Metro becomes the 7th largest daily paper in the US with a total circulation of 620,000 copies. All in all, Metro has an estimated 13 million readers in 30 cities in 16 countries. Not bad for a paper that started in 1995 with distribution in the Stockholm subway.

Mercedes, H&M, Sony Ericsson and Donna Karan are some of the advertisers in the first issue.

The Olympics is already a PR disaster, the Guardian wrote this week (via PR Fuel). Athens is still being a construction site and the negative headlines in media have been frequent. Today there is a long article about the chaos in Athens in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. The Greek themselves do not seem worried that they will not be finished on opening day, saying that "we are last minute people".

Adding insult to injury, Olympic legend Mark Spitz, claimed the other day that the security in Greece may be inadequate to cope with the threat of terrorist attacks. And he didn't have to wait long for those words to come true. Today, with only 100 days to go, Athens was hit by three bombs this morning. If the Greek cannot convince the Americans they have the situation under control, in spite of having four times the security costs of the Sydney games, they have threatend to pull out of the games, which would be a real PR defeat for Greece and the Olympics.

Constantin Basturea has discovered a new PR blog, Media Guerilla by Mike Manuel, that I was unaware of. We add it to the growing list of blogs about public relations.

Here is a short translation of my guest post on JKL blog yesterday.

Blogging is starting to become a hot topic in Swedish media. The number of articles has risen from just 2 articles in 2001, to 56 in 2002, 105 in 2003 and 81 so far this year. The lion share of these articles, or two thirds, are from IT and technology trade press while meta media (media about media) is almost invisible. But Sweden is still lagging behind the US where blogs are debated and exploited by both journalists and PR professionals.

Blogs affect how media work and thereby also people in PR and communication, since blogs have the possibility to transform the relationship media producer/consumer to a conversation. For example, the TV channel VH-1 recently put up a blog for a show they were launching and comments and ideas from the public found its way into the show’s script. Some journalists check facts with bloggers, while others find that their planned scoop for a follow up article is already out on the net, because bloggers have already thought in the same lines. A thousand minds think better than one, you might say.

Some of these new micro media become opinion leaders and how do we as communicators relate to them? Can you pitch a story to a blogger and how do you do that? Communicators often want to have control over information, not from a propaganda perspective, but to have the whole picture in order to make the right decisions. We want to know what is being said about our brand. All this becomes more complicated when blogs become more established in Sweden. One wonders when the first service is launched that monitors and alerts when my brand is mentioned in a blog. Maybe it already exists, if you know, please tell me.

So why is the blogging phenomena not being discussed at all in Swedish marketing and journalism press? The first and most obvious reason is that there are almost no commercial cases to talk about. Corporate blogs are still rare in Sweden. Another reason I think is that the blogosphere is like a universe of its own and if you are not participating in the dialogue, you just don’t realize the potential and the implications of this new form of communication. The blogospere is a little like a black hole, if you come too close you get sucked in and get absorbed, but before that it is all black, you just don’t see it.

My advice to PR professionals in Sweden is that they should start their own blog right now, just to get acquainted with the format, it is easy and free and you can blog anonymously. Once you have decided a theme and you feel that your blog is running smoothly you can make it public and start to market it, although the marketing bit seems almost unnecessary, since blogs are so viral they almost market themselves. That should be enough incentive for any marketer.

Wherever there is a source of information, there is a PR person trying to manipulate it. In a comment to a news article on Poynter.org, Robert Niles writes about his theme park website and how he tracks the IP addresses of all comments.

"...it's telling to see how many comments from supposed tourists were actually coming from inside the corporate network at Disney."

Robert discovered that he was manipulated, but what about all the other cases when PR people are just a fraction more intelligent and post their "under cover" comments from home? I'm sure it happens all over the web already. Then again it could be an internal communications issue, it might not be the works of the PR departement at all. It could just be employees of your own organisation out on the web posing as something they're not. Either way, you get badwill.

Today I am guest blogging on JKL Blog about the increasing attention for blogging in Sweden. Swedish media has written 81 articles so far this year about blogs, compared to 105 articles in 2003, 56 articles in 2002 and just 2 articles in 2001.

But the debate is mainly in the IT and technology press (two thirds of all articles). Marketing media is yet to discover this new form of communication, probably because of lack of local success stories.

The increasing use of news aggregators has triggered the Swedish tabloid Expressen to launch RSS feeds for parts (news, sports and entertainment) of its website.

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