Year: 2005

Blogger interrogated, strip searched and banned from the US

This is not good. Really not. According to reports from the other side of the pond, well-known blogger Jeremy Wright has been “detained, strip searched, and banned from the United States after attempting to legally cross the Canadian-United States border on a trip to New York to meet with uber-publishers McGraw Hill, who were set to sign him as a consultant to the company on blogging.”

Apparently the US Immigration officials accused him of lying as they didn’t believe that he could be employed by blogging, with one official allegedly stating “you couldn’t be doing this blogging thing for a living”.

Wright have since the incident removed certain posts from his blog for legal reasons, but knowing Wright he will post them once the whole thing is over. Hang in there Jeremy, you’ve got our support. [Link via Micropersuasion.]

UPDATE: Jeremy seems to be a-wright. Interesting comment to his post: “If Canadian bloggers had flown the planes into the Towers, I might understand.”

Half of GQ is PR

Dylan Jones, editor of men’s magazine GQ, reveals in Media Guardian (reg. required) that more than half of the magazine’s editorial content has emanated from PR efforts. And he does not view it as a problem.

“In the last issue of GQ, of 155 editorial pages, over half were originally generated by PR. GQ is full of PR-generated material and this usually stems from personal relationships,” he told a PR Week conference, PR and the Media.

On a similar note, this week’s edition of Swedish business weekly Veckans Affärer has a long article about the ever growing importance of the PR industry (subscr. required).

Larsåke Larsson, associate professor at Örebro university, is about to publish a study about PR consultants, journalists and democracy. He says:

“PR consultants claim that they get a lot of articles in papers, while journalists claim that they can’t. But my impression is that it is the PR consultants’ view that is most correct. They do get a lot of stuff in.”

“Journalism is a shrinking part of a growing world of media”

The report The State of the News Media 2005 is out. It’s the second annual report from Journalism.org about the state of American journalism. Some of the key findings are summarized in five major trends about the media landscape.

1) There are now several models of journalism, and the trajectory increasingly is toward those that are faster, looser, and cheaper.

2) The rise in partisanship of news consumption and the notion that people have retreated to their ideological corners for news has been widely exaggerated.

3) To adapt, journalism may have to move in the direction of making its work more transparent and more expert, and of widening the scope of its searchlight.

4) Despite the new demands, there is more evidence than ever that the mainstream media are investing only cautiously in building new audiences.

5) The three broadcast network news divisions face their most important moment of transition in decades.

See also my comments on last year’s survey.

Link via Nu-heter.

Dagens Industri discover blogs – get everything wrong

Sweden’s leading business daily Dagens Industri yesterday published a story about the world’s best blogs, since it has become “so common that both politicians and political editors have joined in”. DI write about South by Southwest Festivals and their blog award “Bloggies”. But the award winners that DI list are not blogs but winners in SXSW 2005 Web Awards, which means they are great sites in general, not just blogs. Bloggies is something else and the 2005 winners are not the ones listed on DI.se although their winners will be awarded at a ceremony during SXSW. Had they checked the Bloggies website they would have found a Swedish site that actually won, namely Francis Strand’s “How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons“.