Media Culpa - Two Swedish eyes on media and public relations

Swedes: "What is a blog?"

Web surveys on media web sites are just about as unscientific as you can get, but they can still serve as an indication. The Swedish arm of IT publishing house IDG has a web survey on its web site idg.se and asks readers about blogs.

"Do you use blogs at your company?"

69.5% What's a blog?
6.2% We don't know if we're blogging or not.
11.2% We have looked at it but decided it's not for us.
1.3% We are blogging, but are sceptical.
2.3% We are blogging and like it.
1.6% We have stopped blogging.
7.8% I have a private blog, but don't know anything about corporate blogs.

Number of responses: 1059

I don't want to read too much into the figures (if I would, then about 50 respondents either have a corporate blog or used to have, and I just don't buy that. To my knowledge, there are just a few Swedish corporate blogs to date, like JKL blog and WPR.) But it is fascinating that such a high percentage answers "What is a blog?". The readers of idg.se should be among the most tech savvy audiences out there.

RSS to be included in Apple's browser Safari

If you ever doubted the importance of distributing information via RSS, take a look at what Dan Gillmor writes about Apple's next operating system, OS X 10.4, aka "Tiger", and the web browser Safari.
Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browers, and a "personal clipping" service. There's a special search function just for RSS; I'm not clear on whether it's searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it's only searching your designated feeds.
Apple says: "Scan all the latest news, information and articles from thousands of your favorite major news organizations, community web sites and personal weblogs in one simple-to-read, searchable article list using Safari RSS."

PR blogging in Iran

Trevor Cook posts about blogging in Iran, which reminds me that I had an email conversation a few weeks ago with Hossein Emami, who is a PR blogger in Iran.

Hossein, who is a real PR blog pioneer, has his own PR blog and he started and runs a corporate blog for his employer, the Export Development Bank of Iran.This was the first corporate blog in Iran. According to Hossein, one of the most important advantages of a corporate blog is the informal tone of voice, compared to more traditional ways of communication. His personal blog is called Ravabete Omoomi, which means "Public Relaions" in Farsi.

Hossein:
"Now there are 5 active bloggers in Iran who write about PR. I write about Media, electronic public relations, journalism, Information communication technology (ICT) etc."

He says that there are two PR societies in Iran: http://www.prsir.org and http://www.pr-pa.org (link does not work at the moment) and that blogging is developing in Iran and Iranians are interested it very much. He points out that the vice president Mr. Abtahi has his own blog (mentioned on this blog earlier).

Hossein:
"There are many Iranian journalists who have blogs, such as Dr. Shokrkhah who is the chief editor of "Jam-e-Jam Online". Jam-e-Jam is one of the newspapers in Iran with highest circulation. Altogether the journalists accept blogs, and use them as a good source of information."

This is another illustrative example of how Swedish PR practitioners, journalists and politicians are lagging many other countries when it comes to blogging. Hopefully, the more articles are being written about blogging in Sweden, the more people will start their own blogs. The Swedish paper Axess has a long and interesting article about watchblogs and the influence of blogs on journalism. More of this, and blogging will take off soon. (Link to Axess via Erik Stattin)

Me and Doc Searls...

One of the really fun things about blogging is when your blog or a post gets picked up by an influential blogger or webpage. A few weeks ago, Dave Winer mentioned one of my posts on Scripting.com (#17 on Technorati Top 100). This week it happened again, Doc Searls, another Internet legend, linked to Media Culpa here. The Doc Searls Weblog is #22 on Technorati Top 100. It may seem insignificant, but it's part of what makes blogging worth doing. Consider there are more than 3 million blogs out there, and you realize that your chances for attention are extremely small.

Newsweek about participatory journalism

MSNBC Newsweek writes about Korean Ohmynews.com and participatory journalism as the future of journalism. Ohmynews employs 25 trained reporters who cover the major news stories of the day, and 33,000 “citizen journalists” who posts stories on the site.

Newsweek writes that founder Oh Yeon Ho’s belief that 'every citizen is a reporter' has changed journalism in South Korea—and now he’s aiming for the world.

Oh Yeon Ho says about participatory journalism: "Technology itself cannot change society. Korean citizens were ready to participate. Only prepared people, who can use the merits of technology, can make a difference."

Link via Donata.

Global PR Blog Week 1.0

I will represent Sweden in the Global PR Blog Week which is coming closer and closer. Yesterday an official press release was distributed to promote the event.

Weeklong Online Conference Featuring Some of the World's Most Influential Public Relations, Marketing and Business Bloggers set for July 12-16, 2004

Live & Interactive Global PR Blog Week Event Opens at
http://www.thenewpr.com

NEW YORK, June 21 /PRNewswire/ --

WHO: Twenty-eight influential public relations, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe will participate in Global PR Blog Week 1.0.

WHAT: Spearheading Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is Australian Trevor Cook and Romanian Constantin Basturea, who, along with 26 other PR bloggers and marketing practitioners, will assemble remotely across the globe (including Australia, Canada, Ireland, Sweden, UK and the U.S.) to discuss many facets of blogging and communications.

The event is split into five topic sections including: PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism, Corporate Blogging, Making PR Work: Creativity & Strategy, Crisis Management and The State of the PR Profession.

Global PR Blog Week will be open to everybody -- for asking questions, making comments and participating in the discussion through the event's weblog.

WHEN: The event takes place during the entire week of July 12th - July 16th 2004.

WHERE: On the Internet. Information and a schedule are available on http://www.thenewpr.com. The actual event will take place on the Global PR Blog Week weblog that will be available at http://www.globalprblogweek.com starting June 28.

WHY: To teach businesses about the interactive communications value of blogging and to discuss a wide variety of topics related to the confluence of public relations and technology. The event will look also into the impact of participatory journalism and personal publishing on the PR practice.

"We want to showcase blogging to help our colleagues and clients understand the value of blogging as a fast, low cost and highly-effective publishing, marketing and content management tool," said Cook, director of the Sydney-based public relations firm Jackson Wells Morris. "With top blogs reaching millions of people daily, and directly influencing journalists and decision-makers, thousands of whom also blog, it is time for blogging to be taken seriously in the marketing mix."

BLOG DEFINITION AND IMPACT: A blog is an Internet publishing tool that allows users with no technical or programming skills to write about a topic and publish to the World Wide Web inexpensively, instantly, and easily. Most current estimates find 3 million blogs amongst an online community of 729.2 million global Internet users, according to Global Reach. Top blogs have readership in the millions, and many have begun to attract mainstream advertisers.

ITINERARY: The schedule for Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is as follows:

MONDAY 12 JULY -- PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism
* Trevor Cook (Corporate Engagement http://trevorcook.typepad.com/weblog/)
* Dan Forbush (ProfNet, Media Insider http://www.mediainsider.com) -
Blogs, Wikis and Expert Networks
* Ryan May (Minnesota Public Relations Blog http://www.mnpr.blogspot.com)
* Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion http://steverubel.typepad.com)
interviewing Jay Rosen, Chair, New York University Department of
Journalism, author of the Pressthink weblog

TUESDAY 13 JULY -- Corporate Blogging
* John Cass (PR Communications http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/)
* Trevor Cook (Corporate Engagement http://trevorcook.typepad.com/weblog/)
will interview Robert Scoble on corporate blogging
* Wayne Hurlbert (Blog Business World
http://www.blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com)
* Hans Kullin (Media Culpa http://www.kullin.net)
* John Mudd (Inside Real Estate Journal
http://insiderealestatejournal.blogspot.com) - How blogs can increase
your sales, help you influence the news and make you an overnight expert
in your field
* Todd Sattersten (A Penny For http://www.apennyfor.com)
* Trudy Schuett (WOLves http://wolves.typepad.com/wolves/) - How Business,
Governments and Non-profits can use blogs to communicate with the public
* Roland Tanglao (Streamline http://www.streamlinewebco.com/blog/)
* Jeremy Wright (Ensight http://www.ensight.org)
* Philip Young (Mediations http://publicsphere.typepad.com/mediations/) -
Ethics in PR

WEDNESDAY 14 JULY -- Making PR Work: Creativity and Strategy
* Elizabeth Albrycht (CorporatePR
http://ringblog.typepad.com/corporatepr/) - Corporate PR - Pragmatic PR
strategies for community building
* Angelo Fernando (Hoi Polloi http://hoipolloi.typepad.com) - Impact of
blogs on PR and Marcomms
* Bernard Goldbach (Irish Eyes http://irish.typepad.com) - Promoting
client messages through blogs
* Alice Marshall (Technoflak http://technoflak.blogspot.com) - Media
relations issues - including pitching small businesses to editors
* Mike Manuel (Media Guerrilla
http://mmanuel.typepad.com/media_guerrilla/) - Micro media measurement
* B.L. Ochman (What's Next Blog http://www.whatsnextblog.com) - Examples
of smart blog use in PR and marketing campaigns and sites that cry out
for blogs
* Anthony V Parcero, (eKetchum Digital Media Group
http://www.eketchum.com) - Developing interactive PR strategies

THURSDAY 15 JULY -- Crisis Management
* John Cass (PR Communications http://pr.typepad.com/pr_communications/)
* Kevin Dugan (Strategic PR http://prblog.typepad.com) - On the Martha
Stewart case
* Jim Horton (Online PR http://online-pr.blogspot.com)
* Colin McKay (Canuckflack http://www.canuckflack.com)
* Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion http://steverubel.typepad.com)
interviewing Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News and author of the
forthcoming book We the Media

FRIDAY 16 JULY -- The State of the PR Profession
* Richard Bailey (PR Studies http://prstudies.typepad.com/weblog)
* Constantin Basturea (PR meets the WWW http://weblog.basturea.com)
* Robb Hecht (PR Machine http://prmachine.blogspot.com)
* Montag (World of Spin http://worldofspin.blogspot.com) - PR needs a
crisis communication plan
* B.L. Ochman (What's Next Blog http://www.whatsnextblog.com) - The PR
Lessons of Bit*hing About Blogging
* Tom Murphy (PR Opinions http://www.natterjackpr.com)

Global PR Blog Week was announced and formulated on The New PR Wiki, a collaboration space for professionals interested in the practice of public relations, hosted at http://www.thenewpr.com. (Wiki is server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.)

Leonardo Da Vinci notes via RSS

Want to read the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks? There are 1,565 pages, but via this RSS feed you can read one per day.

More info here. Link via Dagensbok.com.

PR Managers rely on old fashioned methods for media relations

There is a huge gap between how PR Managers and journalists view the importance of online technologies for communication, according to a survey (pdf) by Glide Technologies. Journalists say that the Internet is the most important source of information about a company, still PR Managers put it at the bottom of their list, after face to face, phone conversation, press conference, press event and PR agency. It indicates that PR Managers value relationships higly, while journalists are more interested in getting the information, with or without relations.

The survey has several interesting findings, for example, 56% of the responding journalists claim that they have seen an increase in the number of press releases the last two years. Almost half of those, say that the volume has more than doubled or tripled. Only 14% of journalists find at least half of all press releases to be of genunie interest, while 88% of PR Managers claim that their press releases are accurately targeted.

When PR Managers want to track which journalists actually reads their press releases, they pick up the phone. The vast majority, 82%, call or contact the journalist (calling to ask "have you read the release I sent you" surely has to be the number one pet peeve of all journalists), while about one in five use some kind of IT tracking.

I can't help but think that these findings confirm that PR practitioners who adopt blogs and RSS will have an advantage over laggards who stick to "wine and dine PR".

Googling stolen articles

The editorial staff at Swedish technology trade weekly Ny Teknik (New Technology) noticed how companies and organisations increasingly copied articles from Ny Teknik and put on their own web pages. In just two days, reporters found 70 copied articles, using a simple search on Google, reports Journalisten.

The people responsible for the web pages were contacted and told to remove the copyrighted material, and then recieved an invoice from Ny Teknik. So far, this search has brought in SEK 110,000 (about 12,000 Euro), from just 13 of these articles.

To me that is a word of warning to bloggers, who often shamelessly copy entire articles or several paragraphs of copyrighted texts.

Link via Erik Stattin.

Nordic media RSS feeds

Corren goes tabloid

Swedish local daily Östgöta Correspondeten, "Corren", will become a tabloid in February next year. It is the 9th Swedish paper to downsize to tabloid format during the last 12 months.

Immedeacy vs. Accuracy

It is not just in blogs that "immedeacy is more important than accuracy" to borrow the words of Nick Denton. The same sometimes goes for traditional online media. Today, the hottest news story in Sweden is whether Italian striker Francesco Totti would get suspended for spitting Danish player Christian Poulsen (Sweden faces Italy tomorrow in Euro 2004). In the race for getting the news out first, Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet jumped the gun and declared that UEFA had decided to suspend Totti. Problem was, they hadn't.

The article was withdrawn for a short while and a media culpa was published, blaming "technical problems"! "Due to a technical error Aftonbladet previously reported that Totti had been suspended".

Update: Totti did indeed get suspended, and the media culpa was lifted from aftonbladet.se shortly after.

Lawyer blogs on antitrust lawsuit

Since I work for a law firm I try to stay informed about blawgs, and here is another interesting example. Dan Gillmor writes about the lawsuit "United States of America v. Oracle" which is the antitrust case regarding Oracle's hostile takeover of PeopleSoft.

Gary Reback, a lawyer for PeopleSoft, is posting daily summaries of the trial on a blog-like format on the PeopleSoft webpage. It is interesting that PeopleSoft use a blog to communicate their side of the story and it shows the importance (at least in the US) of fighting a trial also outside of the court room.

Bulgarian news agency spreads false rumours

The Bulgarian media do what they can to increase the temperature for tonight's soccer clash bewteen Sweden and Bulgaria in Euro 2004. News agency Novinite even spreads false quotes from the Swedish coach Lars Lagerbäck.

"This is the poorest play in defense that I can imagine, says coach Lars Lagerback.

In his words Bulgarians' swift attacks are doomed to fail as "nobody know what to do".

Forwarder, Bayer 04 Leverkusen's Dimitar Berbatov, was described as "talented, but lazy".

Lagerbäck denies having said anything close to this.

Smartmobs on journalism

Howard Rheingold publishes a speech he delivered yesterday to the graduating class of Stanford's Communication Department.

He writes: "I am convinced that the last time young communicators faced this degree of excitement, peril, opportunity, uncertainty, and responsibility was 1776."

And: "While all these attacks on expression are underway and barriers to communication are being put in place, people around the globe are making entirely new kinds of art and journalism. Young people in every part of the world are using and inventing blogs, wikis, mobile messaging, desktop video, digital music, online animation, social software."

Dream job - Chief Blogger?

In a few years, when we ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up, will they answer "Chief Blogger"? Anyway, I picked this new title up from a post on Online Public Relations Thoughts. Chris Halvorson is Chief Blogger and Web Editor/Writer for Stonyfield Farms' five corporate blogs.

Reagan might have been behind Soviet submarine running aground in Sweden in 1981

Slightly off topic, but this is too hot to resist. Insightmag.com has some sensational information about the Soviet submarine that went aground in Sweden in 1981. According to this article, the Reagan administration cooperated with Sweden to trap a Soviet submarine on Swedish waters.

Another deft tactical coup in covert activity, also reported here for the first time, occurred when Weinberger visited the Swedish Defense Ministry from Oct. 15-19, 1981, the first visit ever by a U.S. Defense secretary to that country.

Top Swedish defense officials showed Weinberger ministry charts and action reports that gave details of earlier penetration by Soviet and Warsaw Pact submarines into restricted Swedish military areas in violation of international law, according to U.S. intelligence sources close to the case at the time.

Then, on Oct. 27, a Soviet Whiskey-class sub suddenly and very publicly ran aground on the rocks inside a Swedish military base, using a route that had been used previously by another Soviet intruder, these sources said.

Swedish military planners had been increasingly nervous about a Soviet military buildup in the region on the nearby Kola Peninsula. And politically the Swedes were deeply embroiled in the pros and cons of deploying new Pershing II and ground-based cruise missiles in Western Europe, which had been approved by NATO in a 1979 decision, these sources said. Some Swedes thought this a needless provocation and a threat to East-West détente.

According to former U.S. Air Force intelligence sources, it was decided at the Swedish-Weinberger meetings to trap and detain a Soviet submarine, and the office of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush was kept closely apprised of the plan.

These sources also said U.S. technology was able to manipulate the sub's instruments, causing them to exhibit "false readings" until it was misled and went aground. "We had that sort of technology," one of the former intelligence officials said.

The result was a huge shock to Sweden, a toughening of its political attitudes, and a huge propaganda victory for the Reagan administration.

Should this be true, this is astonishing new facts about one of the most spectacular news stories in Sweden in the 1980's. If the Swedish military was involved in trapping the submarine, how come it took 12 hours after it stranded until it got discovered?

UPDATE: Caspar Weinberger made a long interview with Swedish Television in March 2000 about submarines on Swedish waters and the US involvement. Transcript and video found here.

Dagens Nyheter goes tabloid

The largest daily in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter, yesterday decided to completely transfer to a tabloid format. DN has kept one of its sections in broadsheet format, but will now follow the other major Swedish papers who have already taken the step or recently made the decision to do so (Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten and Sydsvenska Dagbladet). When this change will be implemented is not yet decided.

Also, see recent post about the death of broadsheet.

PR Week on PR blogging

PR Week reports on the Global PR Blog Week 1.0 and on PR blogging in general. Several of the most influential PR bloggers, like Steve Rubel and Trevor Cook are interviewed.

6000 articles is enough

The perfect news story has had Swedish media in a strong grip all year. It includes the ingredients for a perfect drama: sex, murder, infidelity, jealousy, God and SMS. The story broke on January 10, 2004 with a murder in the small community of Knutby, outside of Uppsala. A 27-year-old nanny working for a pastor of the Pentecostal congregation, has confessed shooting dead his wife and trying to kill the man next door.

Since the day of the murder this has been front page news in Swedish media. A total of 6686 articles have been written so far (search on "Knutby" via Retriever online search). I would have bet a few bucks that the two leading tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen would be the ones writing most articles, but the Pentecostal movements own paper Nya Dagen actually comes second. Upsala Nya Tidning is the local daily in the Knutby area.

Aftonbladet: 412 articles
Nya Dagen: 362
Expressen: 333
Upsala Nya Tidning: 312
GT: 304

An editor at Dagbladet yesterday said in a column in Dagens Media that the amount of coverage is "both unreasonable and justified. Unreasonable in comparison to other big stories, but justified because of the enormous interest. We want to know as much as possible about this unbelievable story".

It is the classic question about media just giving us what we want, which I don't accept. I say enough already! 6686 articles is quite enough.

Reuters has the article in English today. (Link via Gunnar.net)

Don't be rude to a journalist with a blog

PR practitioners mess up now and then, as everybody else. Problem is that when you are rude to a journalist who has a personal blog, it becomes public knowledge.

Freelance writer Simone Paddock had an unpleasant encounter with a PR rep from the Sisters Rodeo Association. The whole story was out on her blog yesterday.

Lesson learned. Of course you should not treat reporters badly, but if you pick one who has a personal blog, chances are the damages increase exponentially.

Link via Utterlyboring.com.

Resumé - welcome to the blogosphere

Swedish marketing weekly Resumé finally stepped up to the plate today and wrote an article (in Swedish) about blogs (Nike's adverblog). But it took an article in Brand Republic to get them interested. Resumé often (28 hits on their webpage) rewrites material from Brand Republic.

It strikes me as funny that the most influential marketing weekly in Sweden, who should be in the forefront when it comes to covering development in media and communications, has never written about blogs until today (confirmed by my previous research about media coverage for blogs in Sweden). And still they manage to sound like this is old news. Resumé writes "finally advertisers get the point with blogs" and "millions of people around the world have gotten the point about blogs...". Well, we, the millions who already got it, welcome Resumé to the blogosphere. It was about time.

Iraq wants to add some IQ to the net

Iraq's media commission and the U.S.-led administration in Iraq have filed an application to ICANN for registration of the domain code ".IQ" as Iraq's own country code on the Internet. The Iraqi chairman of the National Communications & Media Commission, Siyamend Othman, said the .IQ domain name would allow Iraqis to stake a "virtual flag" in the worldwide Internet community. (source: USA Today)

The choice of .IQ as domain name might also have other positive implications. Other countries have seen positive effects when being given a valuable domain name. For example, the small island Tuvalu leased its Internet domain name ".tv" for $50 million in royalties over the next dozen years. And another small island, Niue, got the domain name .NU which means "now" in Swedish. In 2002, there were 140,000 .NU domains registered, of which 61 per cent came from Sweden. (source: nunames.nu)

In the knowledge society of today, will the .IQ domain be as attractive?

Online RSS newspaper

Cameron Barrett and Joe Stump have started a news service called TodaysPapers.com, that aggregates news into different categories from more than 100 web pages via RSS. The format is similiar to Google News. According to the website "TodaysPapers is the next step in personal news management and media research." Maybe this could be something for Steve Rubel's all-blog media diet?

Link via Mymarkup.

Coverage of blogs reach record levels

Coverage of blogs in Swedish media continue to rise and hit new record levels (irony intended, see previous post). There were a total of 28 articles in Swedish media about blogs during May, several of them reporting on Bill Gates comments about blogs. IT and technology press make up half of this number, while marketing and journalism press are still silent. Source: online publications via a Retriever search.

Major Swedish media fell for oil price myth

Breaking news. Only on Media Culpa.

Many Swedish media today fell for the oil price myth. Aftonbladet reported during the day that "today the highest oil price ever was noted on the Nymex exchange in New York". The article headline is "Oil price reached new record level today" and states that "this afternoon the highest oil price was noted in the 21 year history of Nymex exchange" and quotes the oil price from a telegram from TT, the Swedish wire service, that says the oil price was on 42 dollar per barrel for a while.

Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet ran the same story tonight based on a telegram from TT, claiming that the oil price "reached its highest level ever".

News agency Direkt reported in a telegram at 21:17 tonight that "oil once again noted a record price on Nymex New York exchange" and that the oil price was at 42:32 dollar per barrel.

Having read the article on Spinsanity earlier today, I figured I'd have to check if this was adjusted for inflation. I quote Spinsanity:

But examined fairly, it's simply not true. This myth is based on a misunderstanding of one of the most basic of economic concepts: inflation. As the general price level of products rise, a dollar today is worth less than it was in the past. The only fair way to compare the price of a good over time is to use the inflation-adjusted price.

It took me two minutes to find this chart that clearly states that the oil price was far higher 1981, if adjusted to inflation.

Chart from Inflationdata.com. Full size chart here.

Update: The articles in Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet were updated last night, and the phrase "the highest price ever" was removed from the first paragraph. The article now only states that the price is the highest in the 21 years since Nymex exchange started, which technically is true, but oil was traded before 1983, and to a higher price as this chart shows.

In the printed version of Svenska Dagbladet today there is an article with the headline "Many factors behind new record price for oil". On the web there is a new article with the headline "Record expensive oil pressed the Asian stock markets". Free commuter daily Metro has this as its top story today with the headline "Record high oil price".
Metro headline

The death of broadsheet

One of the biggest dailies in Sweden, Göteborgs-Posten, turns tabloid before year end. The death of broadsheet can be studied in several articles on Editorsweblog.org today as it reports from World Editors Forum in Istanbul. For example, only two months after its launch, the Polish tabloid Fakt became the biggest newspaper in Poland.

"The biggest single threat to broadsheets comes from the fact that readers have less time to read.", said George Brock, Managing Editor of The Times of London.

Furthermore, "tabloids are the future for Mexican papers, says El Universal editor Raymundo Riva-Palacio.

Editors' jobs become more important with blogs

Editorsweblog.org reports about a debate during the World Editor's Forum. According to the article, Dean Wright, Editor-in-Chief and Vice President, MSBNC.com, and Jean-Louis Cebrián, Chief Executive Officer of PRISA Group and EL PAÍS, agreed that the newspaper "editor's role becomes more important" in a new media environment in which news can be produced and disseminated through online means such as blogs.

Oil price myth

Claims that oil prices in the US are higher than ever have frequently been reported in media. Problem is, it's not true. Democrats are spinning this claim (and media report about it), but forget to use the inflation-adjusted price which was about 50 per cent higher in 1981. Spinsanity has the complete story today.