Year: 2005

To misquote my favourite EP of all time, “16 Days/Gathering Dust” by This Mortal Coil (featuring their unforgettable version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”), I am back from 16 days of vacation in Thailand, doing not much else than lying on the beach gathering dust. No tv, no radio, no newspapers and no internet for two and a half weeks is very refreshing for a media addict like myself. But back at the lab again, my Bloglines account is close to collapsing, and I seriously don’t know where to start reading all the thousands of posts that have piled up since I last logged in. But here are a few things worth noting that happened the last weeks.

* Media monitoring company Agent25 follow in the footsteps of Observer and starts monitoring a number of blogs. UPDATE: My blog is on the list of blogs in English, along with prominent bloggers Bjørn Stærk, Johan Norberg, EU Commissioner Margot Wallström, Peter Lindberg, Stefan Geens, Stockholm Spectator, Undercurrent and Carl Bildt (see below).
* Annika Billström, City Commissioner in Sockholm starts blogging.
* Former Swedish prime minister and leader of the Moderate Party, Carl Bildt has started blogging. What took you so long?
* Alf Fyhrlund from SCB, the Swedish Census Bureau, has started a blog about regional and local statistics in Sweden and interantionally. Link via Markmedia.
* Dailies Trelleborgs Allehanda and Ystads Allehanda starts RSS feeds. (Hat tip to Fredrik Wackå).
* Swedish public service television SVT reconsiders its attitude towards blogs. Two months ago journalist Per Gudmundson was forced to shut down his blog, ranked Sweden’s 4th most influential by Observer. Now SVT are looking at how to use blogs to “develop communcation between SVT and its audiences”. Irony, anyone?
* SBS who owns TV channel Kanal 5 bought cable channel Canal Plus.

…check back later.

A guy takes a photo of a photographer taking a photo. Guy posts photo of photographer on Flickr. A friend of the photographer finds the photo and the photographer then joins Flickr and posts the photo she took while being photographed. Phew… You’d better read the story at FlickrBlog instead. It’s quite amazing.

New York Times Link Generator: Creating weblog-safe links to NY Times articles.

Hardly anyone reading PR blogs could have escaped last week’s hoopla about Jay Rosen’s attack on PR bloggers accusing PR bloggers of ignoring the Armstrong Williams-Ketchum affair. For those of you who missed the whole thing, I list some links at the bottom of this post.

Now it seems that yet another journalist got paid to promote an initiative from the Bush administration. Maggie Gallagher had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families. But she failed to disclose it. In her syndicated column she dismissed the arguments against “President Bush’s modest marriage initiative” as “nonsense”.

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said yesterday. “I don’t know. You tell me.” She said she would have “been happy to tell anyone who called me” about the contract but that “frankly, it never occurred to me” to disclose it.

Duh, yes, that would be pretty obviuos.

Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that “I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.”

It never occured to her, and she didn’t remember. How lame is that?

Considering Jay Rosen’s response, it is important for both PR professionals and journalists to clearly state that the practice of payola is not acceptable.

Footnote: Links about the Armstrong Williams debacle:

Jan 7: USA Today reveals that PR agency Ketchum paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind initiative.

Jan 7: Richard Edelman responds.

Jan 9: Jeremy Pepper responds.

Jan 11: Half-hearted response from PRSA.

Jan 14: Shel Holz comments.

Jan 19: Jay Rosen blasts the PR blogosphere for not commenting enough about the incident. PR bloggers try (and succeed to some extent) to prove him wrong and that his research is shallow.

Jan 20: Lisa Stone at PressThink does a follow up.

Jan 20: NY Times (reg required) about Ketchum’s apology.

The aftermath:

Jan 21: Shel Holz again.

Jan 21: Elizabeth Albrycht