Month: May 2005

Wired is investigating whether one of their freelance journalists Michelle Delio may have fabricated quotes in some articles. Wired News has published more than 700 news stories written by Delio. When MIT Technology Review Online and InfoWorld edited or retracted stories by Delio after concerns about the authenticity of some sources, Wired assigned journalism professor Adam Penenberg to review a number of articles. In several cases they could not locate and confirm some of the sources Delio used. Wired lists 24 articles and ask readers to help confirm these stories. From now on they also require freelance reporters to submit contact information for all named sources. Anonymous sources will be used only with appropriate justification.

Swedish mainstream media are currently launching a bunch of blogs on their websites. I found a new one today at Aftonbladet where Tomas Ros blogs about the World Championships in hockey.

The other day Svenska Dagbladet launched a blog where a student, Helena Myrin, blogs about life after high school. (Hat tip to Chadie). On May 3 Expressen launched five blogs for a few of their well known columnists:

> PM Nilsson
> Cecilia Hagen
> Per Svensson
> Linda Skugge
> Ebba von Sydow

Journalist Fredrik Virtanen at Aftonbladet has attracted some impressive traffic to his quit-smoking-blog from its inception last month. And Sofia Olsson Olsén, chief editor at Norra Västerbotten has been blogging at Sofia OO just nu since December 2004. Political editor PJ Anders Linder was the first journalist with a blog hosted on a media website when he started his op-ed blog PJ just nu in August 2004.

During the last few months we have also seen the birth of some trade media blogs like science publication Forskning och Framsteg and IT publication IDG has one called IDG Subjektivt.

Norwegian daily Dagbladet has a different approach to its five blogs (football, politics, music, games and nightlife). It has invited some wellknown bloggers to participate on the blogs, like Bjørn Stærk.

Footnote: Aftonbladet promised to give 18-year old Evelina Björkegren a blog to be hosted at Aftonbladet.se. Her mother has chronic muscular pain and the family runs the risk of being evicted from their house. But from what I can see the blog is hosted at http://evelina.webblogg.se/

There are also a number of journalists with private blogs. More about that later.

Amy Gahran writes an illuminating piece about transparency and credibility in media and blogs.

“Traditional news organizations often give lip service to the value of transparency. In practice they generally prefer to present themselves as omniscient, objective, and authoritative – a surprisingly opaque and highly artificial (incredible) stance.

For instance, most traditional news organizations publish only the finished results of their reporting and editorial processes. Even when publishing online, they often avoid or minimize direct links to sources. Questions or disagreements generally may be raised only via private communications with reporters and editors, and these discussions generally become public only at the news venue’s discretion (via “letters to the editor”).”

I find that media often explain the lack of external links with a fear of driving traffic away from the website (and the ads). I can understand the rationale behind that view, keeping the visitor as long as possible at the site will generate a much needed revenue, but there surely must be ways of making the sites “sticky” enough and still enable external links for increased transparency. The Norwegian blog Undercurrent has an interesting article about the original design of Norwegian newspapers’ websites. They have a huge amount of internal links which may help explain their relative success. Visitors are lured into clicking on links for additional news stories. The author Olav Anders Øvrebø calls it “the Drunken Sailor theory of web behaviour”.

According to Forrester research, US companies are planning to take ad budgets from traditional media to online channels like blogs and RSS feeds. One of the key findings says:

“Sixty-four percent of respondents are interested in advertising on blogs, 57 percent through RSS and 52 percent on mobile devices, including phones and PDAs.“

An established “truth” in the blogosphere is that the left-wing in Sweden is not present in the blogosphere. Wiwi-Anne Johansson, Head of information at Vänsterpartiet (the Left Party) says in an interview in Dagens Nyheter today that the she will be working for the establishment of party blogs.

– Vi har inga bloggar i dag men jag kommer att arbeta för att vi får det, säger Wiwi-Anne Johansson, informationschef på vänsterpartiet.