Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
PR Week offers lazy PR pros a heads-up on what ten media trends to watch in the near future.
1. Portability of video content
2. Blogs
3. The rise of celebrity weeklies
4. Media transparency
5. The growth of Hispanic media
6. Business woes for newspapers
7. Digitalization of print media
8. Media consolidation
9. Source agnostic/disintermediation
10. Refining media measurement
Full explanation here.
A new blog book is out, written by two prominent bloggers and a journalism teacher. “Bloggtider” by Lars Våge, Erik Stattin and Gunnar Nygren is released today and it seems to be interesting reading. But why does a book by three men have a pretty young woman on the cover? She’s nothing but an eye-catcher, obviously.
Aaron Braaten has compiled his Great Canadian Blog Survey in a 56-page report and it is some quite interesting reading. Since his survey was inspired by my BlogSweden (pdf) report from earlier this year, some of the findings are comparable between Canada and Sweden. For example:
– Swedish blog readers are more likely to have a blog of their own. 55% of Canadian blog readers also have their own blogs whereas 60.4% of Swedish blog readers also had blogs of their own.
– Canadian blog readers are slightly older than Swedish. Swedish blog readers are more likely to be between ages 26-30, while Canadians are more clustered around 31-35. A total of 63.4% of Swedes were between 21 and 35 while 50.3% of Canadians were between 18 and 35.
– 71.5% of Canadian blog readers were male, whereas in Sweden the percentage of male blog readers were 63.5%.
– 57.8% of Canadian blog readers read 6 blogs or more per day. In my study, 59.1% of Swedes indicated that they read 6 or more blogs per day.
– Swedes are more likely to use RSS readers to read blogs. 47.2% of Swedish blog readers always or sometimes use an RSS reader whereas the same figure in Canada is 31.3%.
– The majority (58.1%) of bloggers and blog readers in Canada spend one hour or less each day reading blogs. In comparison, 72.9% of Swedish blog readers spend 5 hours or less per week reading blogs.
– Number one reason to read blogs is the same in both Canada and Sweden: “More perspectives on news”.
– Number one reason to blog is the same for Canadians and Swedes: “To write”.
– Number one way to find other blogs to read is the same in both countries: “Links on other blogs”.
Fellow PR blogger Andy Lark writes that “Yahoo! News is now delivering blogs as a component of a news search result”. Check out Andy’s blog for a screen shot or try yourself here. The feature is still in beta, and a search for Swedish terms delivers about 90 per cent (a rough estimate) non-blogs among blog results. Almost all of the Swedish “blogs” are traditional media with RSS feeds so the service needs some adjustments to be of any real value outside the US.
I was going to post a comment to a column (not online, how typical) in yesterday’s Resumé where Janne Sundling thinks the blog is dead because Per Svensson at Expressen ditched his blog. But Fredrik Wackå says it all so I have nothing to add. Henrik Torstensson and Jonas Morian also comment (all in Swedish).