Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Per Gudmundson who quit his popular blog to be able to keep his job as journalist at public service channel SVT 24, is back in the blogosphere. He will cover the annual political mega-event in Almedalen on a blogg due to start on Sunday, reports SVT 24.
I’m not surprised considering the positive attitudes during mine and Per’s blog presentation for SVT’s management a month ago.
Link via Zaidas tankar.
It has almost become an established truth that the Swedish blogger is 1) man, 2) writes about politics and social issues and 3) has right-wing preferences. But these are just assumptions. So in order to get more facts about the Swedish blogosphere, I initiated a blog survey between May 12 and 16, 2005 where 600 blog readers answered a number of questions.
Here is a summary of the results:
Bloggers: The average Swedish blogger is:
· man
· 26-35 years old
· has a college/university degree
· both parents are born in Sweden
· does not know what party to vote for if there was an election today (largest party was Folkpartiet – the liberal party)
· blogs because he likes to write
· blogs in Swedish
· is not anonymous
· reads 6-10 blogs daily
· spends 6-10 hours per week reading blogs
· often or sometimes uses an RSS reader to read blogs
· reads blogs because it is more personal than other media
· finds new blogs via links on other blogs
Blog readers: The average Swedish blog reader (including those who have their own blogs) is:
· man
· 26-30 years old
· has a college/university degree
· both parents are born in Sweden
· would vote for Moderaterna – the moderate party – if there was an election today
· has his own blog
· reads 1-5 blogs daily
· spends 2 hours per week reading blogs
· never uses an RSS reader to read blogs
· reads blogs to get different views on news
· finds new blogs via links on other blogs
Other interesting results from the survey:
· Blog readers vote to the right. The right-wing parties get 62.4% of all votes.
· Bloggers vote (slightly less) to the right. 52.6% of bloggers vote for the right-wing parties while 47.6% would vote to the left.
· Male bloggers vote to the right (57.4%).
· Female bloggers vote to the left. (s), (v), (mp) and (fi) get 55.4% of the votes.
· Among blog readers who don’t blog themselves, the moderate party (m) is the dominant party. More than a third (36.8%) of this group would vote for (m).
· Many bloggers do not know who to vote for, but female bloggers are more uncertain than male (29.8% of female bloggers, 18.5% of male bloggers)
· Women blog anonymously (60.6%), men reveal their identity (69.4%)
· Most women don’t use an RSS reader to read blogs, but most men do.
· Female bloggers have slightly higher education than male bloggers.
· Male bloggers more often blog to influence others and to become famous, than female bloggers do.
· Those who use an RSS reader, read more blogs than those who don’t use an RSS reader.
· 96.9% of respondents who read 26 blogs or more daily, use an RSS reader (often or sometimes).
· Bloggers read more blogs and spend more time reading blogs than blog readers who don’t have a blog of their own.
· Half of all blog readers spend 4 hours or more per week reading blogs, which is 34 minutes or more per day. Compared to the average Swede who spends 28 minutes per day reading a daily newspaper.
The entire report can be downloaded here (pdf 429kb) in English or here (pdf 311kb) in Swedish.
In addition, here are a few of the graphs from the report in jpg-format. The first is a graph showing reasons why bloggers started blogging.
The second shows the reasons why blog readers choose to read blogs.
It is also interesting to compare the last graph with the corresponding question in Blogads US survey earlier this year. The results are not extremely different.
You can learn a lot about what media consider to be the most important issues on the agenda by looking at the way they structure their websites. Spot the odd one out in the top of the hierarchy at Expressen.se:
News, Sports, Entertainment, Weather, Archives, Search, Blog and Poker. Poker? Puh-lease…
I notice that both the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times have poker columns so I guess it’s just logical. Aftonbladet has a poker page too. Diversity, anyone?
Like Magnus already noted, Ola Larsmo at Dagens Nyheter today writes about blogs and he wants media to stop arguing about journalist blogs and instead open up to new voices. Well put. I remember saying something along the same lines about a week ago.
“Vad är det egentligen vi bråkar om? Redan etablerade skribenters rätt att yttra sig i ännu ett medium? Men varsågod. Det är inte så problemet ser ut, utan den fråga man bör ställa sig varför medierna inte är mer öppna åt andra hållet – det spännande med den nya tekniken var ju att det skulle släppa fram nya röster, de där som de etablerade mediernas inskränkthet höll borta? Är det inte det pinsamma tomrummet vi bör diskutera, och kanske rent av göra något åt – i stället för att bli indignerade för att någon ifrågasätter behovet av fler ögonblicksbilder ur innerstadsmedelklassmediefolkets leverne? Exemplet Salam Pax är lysande i sin förebildlighet – och vad som fordras nu är en lyhördhet från redaktionerna, en nyfikenhet på de nya rösterna.”
Belinda Olsson, columnist at Aftonbladet, writes today about blogs and delivers the quote of the day:
“Jag läser bloggar då och då, det är inte det. Jag förstår grejen med att om man älskar en skribent är det kul att få lite extra dvd-aktigt material. Jag skulle själv gärna läsa lite blogg (dagbok) av Carolina Gynning. Men revolution? Nu kan vem som helst bli journalist? Jag kan inte rabbla upp en enda icke-journalist som har en blogg.”
“Revolution? Now anyone can become a journalist? I can’t name one single non-journalist with a blog.” How ignorant can you get? She has been given a platform to communicate to hundreds of thousands of readers and just because she can’t name a blogger that isn’t a journalist, blogs don’t matter. I can’t name a single French philosopher, but that doesn’t mean no-one reads them. But then again, who cares what I think? I’m just a non-journalist blogger.
Here is another must-read from Poynter Online. Steve Outing outlines 11 phases of citizen or participatory journalism. How many Swedish media have come past step one?
1. The first step: Opening up to public comment
2. Second step: The citizen add-on reporter
3. Now we’re getting serious: Open-source reporting
4. The citizen bloghouse
5. Newsroom citizen ‘transparency’ blogs
6. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version
7. The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version
8. Add a print edition
9. The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism
10. Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof
11. Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors