Media Culpa - Two Swedish eyes on media and public relations

Hans #27

Jackie Huba at the Church of the Customer blog writes about a phenomenon called Google Juice, which is supposed to be "the ethereal substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks (in both directions!" and "the mysterious quality that causes pages to come up high in a Google search". And since Google like blogs, bloggers get high rankings. For example, the number one Robert on Google is Microsoft überblogger Robert Scoble (except he's really #4 when I try the search). Turns out I am Hans #27 on Google, and like Scoble, I don't even have my name as the name of my blog. Other examples are Swedish blogger Henrik Torstensson, the #1 Henrik on Google, a few notches before writer Henrik Ibsen.

Radio Sweden podcast via Feedburner

Swedish Radio are testing podcasting for their English language program Radio Sweden. What is interesting to see is that they use free tools like Blogdrive and Feedburner. The articles are distributed via an RSS feed at Blogdrive (http://radiosweden.blogdrive.com/index.xml) and the podcasts via Feedburner (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioSweden). And I don't think it's wrong to rely on external solutions because it shows that they are eager to try new things and get started, rather than wait for internal procedures which almost always slow these kind of initiatives down. One negative effect though might be if they decide to change tools in the future and have a new URL, they might lose subscribers.

For some reason the mp3 files are posted to a free blog on Blogspot.com while the actual files are located on radiosweden.org.

Apple blocks DVD Jon's iTunes hack

Apple has now stopped iTunes users who use DVD Jon's PyMusique hack. It made it possible to download songs without any copy-protection technology attached. But in order to plug the security hole, Apple is now requiring anyone who wants to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store to upgrade to at least iTunes 4.7.1, and it has some negative side effects.

Virgin Radio starts podcasting

Two weeks ago Virgin Radio became the first UK radio station to podcast a daily show. The shows are free thanks to advertising. Writes Brand Republic:

The programme will be around 40 minutes long and should be available from about 10.30am each morning for listeners to play back whenever they want. Ads will appear at the beginning and in the outro, with short ads interspersed through the programme.

This is quite interesting because it means that I will now have access to international radio even if I'm not strapped to my computer. It would also be interesting to see if this kind of advertising works or if listeners simply fast forward the ads.

Current.org has a list of broadcasters who podcast.

John Edwards goes podcasting

Former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards is going to start podcasting next week, according to CNET.

Swedish radio starts podcasting

I just recently listened to my first podcasts. I hadn't really bothered to try it out until there was some content that I'd be interested in. But fellow PR bloggers Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson are doing a groundbreaking job with their podcast "For Immediate Release - the Hobson and Holtz Report" so I simpy had to tune in. And I must say it is a terrific show, it's like having a one hour radio show about PR and blogging twice a week that you can listen to any time you want. Highly recommended (although I had some trouble with the latest podcast which was all messed up in my mp3-player).

UPDATE: Seems that the file is working the second time I tried it. No idea why.

Now it seems that SR, Swedish public service radio, are starting podcast trials, initially with 5 or 6 shows that will be available in mp3-format. There are still some copyright issues to be solved regarding for example signature tunes.

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".

Another media watchdog

A popular pastime for Swedish bloggers is to look for alleged bias and factual errors in traditional media. Conspiracy theories are abundant. Today I found a new media watchdog (via Chadie) called Mediakoll. The site's RSS feed is not posted on the site, but this is the address: http://mediakoll.blogspot.com/atom.xml

100 people to know in media

Congrats to Steve Rubel and six other bloggers for making it to Media Magazine's top 100 list (pdf) of people to know in media (in the US). See Steve, I was right when I named you the most influential PR blogger in May last year ;-)

Boston Legal episode on media bias gets censored

ABC's TV drama "Boston Legal" debuts in Sweden next Monday on TV3. Apparently the show's script is too controversial for the big media moguls on the other side of the pond. In a recent episode, the show debates the issue of media bias but it doesn't name any names, especially not Fox News Channel because ABC asked the executive producer and writer David E. Kelley to remove references to Fox. In the original script a school principal uses FOXBlocker to block Fox on televisions in his school. Instead, there is criticism of TV news in general and one unidentified network in particular. The network also refused to run an ad for the film Outfoxed.

Full story in Miami Herald (registration required). Link via the Media Drop.

Romano Prodi sort of blogs

Another European top politician starts blogging. Il Blog del Presidente is the name of former President of the European Commission Romano Prodi's new blog. Or is it a blog? It lacks many of the features we expect to find in a blog. And since he is the former President, shouldn't that be "Il Blog del Precedente Presidente"? (Precedente is Italian for previous or former).

[Link via CorporateBlogging]

Also, I noticed that the EUobserver now has RSS feeds.

Get the first track back

There has been an intense debate in Sweden the last few days regarding a dawn raid against an internet service provider. The ISP had four servers in their office which allegedly had hundreds of thousands of illegal files available for downloading. Well, I have another question regarding measures to stop illegal file sharing, namely copy protection. Can a CD with copy control fail to play correctly in some CD players? I have experienced that my CD player cannot play the first track of some of my new albums, for example R.Kelly's "Happy People" and Christian Walz' "Paint By Numbers". I even went back to the store with Walz' record and got a new copy - same problem with that one. And they work ok when I play them on my car stereo, so something on these CDs is making my CD player go nuts.

Twice can be a coincidence but three times is a pattern. So does this have something to do with copy control? I read somewhere that some techniques include adding information in the beginning of the CD that ordinary CD players ignore but makes it able to control how it is being used on a computer. Can this cause my player to get stuck? I don't know.

Both examples of albums above are from the BMG label so I went to their site http://www.bmgcopycontrol.com to seek answers but scored zilch. I even wrote them an email asking for advice, but no reply. So now I'm asking the blogosphere. Any advice? To me this seems like I've been sold flawed goods.

Footnote: My CD player is a Denon DCM-360, which should have quality enough to play any CDs.

Last days to vote for Sweden's best blog

March 15 is the last day to vote for Sweden's best blog in Internetworld's poll. Just follow this link and cast your vote for Media Culpa or any of the other 49 nominated blogs, then click the grey button marked "Rösta" (Vote, in Swedish). Winners will be published on April 26.

Bloggers on SVT Text

Blogging goes mainstream. Yesterday on the front page of Dagens Nyheter, today on the first page of SVT text (Swedish Television). The article is about how bloggers who published information about Apple, might have to reveal their sources.

Lawyers read blogs

There are some interesting stats in the new blog reader survey from Blogads. Like for example that more than 5% of the readers are lawyers or judges. In addition, 7.1% say they are in the legal industry, more than in media, advertising and PR. Wonder if they are reading blawgs about their own business or if they are checking the blogosphere for their clients.

Other findings are that the New Yorker seems to be a popular publication among blog readers. Almost 18% subscribe to it. Furthermore, one out of five blog readers is a blogger.

Quote of the day

Adam L. Penenberg in Wired, about the Wall Street Journal being close to invisible in Google.

If you can input the name of your publication into a search engine and not come up with any stories, you must be digitally tone-deaf.

Related article.

Ads in RSS - oh yeah, it's coming

The blogosphere is currently abuzz about the entrance of advertising in RSS feeds on a broader scale. The other week, Kanoodle announced they were partnering with Moreover for the launch of BrightAds.

Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle's content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners' RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts.

As a response Ed Sim at the BeyondVC blog decided to launch a second feed to be able to fool around with the ads. He's convinced RSS ads will become standard procedure for publishers. Monitor his blog for feedback on the experiment.

First, the fact of consuming RSS feeds will typically reduce traffic at many publishers' websites giving them less opportunity to monetize their assets. Ads in RSS will help publishers overcome the lower traffic to their sites while still providing their users with up to date content. Secondly, ads embedded in RSS feed gives great targeting opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

In October, Pheedo estimated the number of RSS ad impressions for 2004 to be 77 million, up to 308 Million in 2005 and 1.2 billion in 2006. Now, I don't know if that's a lot or not, but it's fairly safe to predict an increase in feeds that add ads as publishers, both bloggers and traditional media, want to monetize on a large subscriber base. Not everyone can quit their day job to live on donations like Jason Kottke.

InfoWorld.com earlier this year reported that its top RSS feed page on its Web site was receiving more total visits than its home page. How can such a distribution channel remain ad free?

Media threaten linking bloggers

Lawrence Lessig bashes the syndicators of the Bill O'Reilly column who accuse a blog of "unauthorized linking". But that's not the only recent case. Not long ago Tulsa World had a somewhat similar approach and sent cease and desist orders to Michael Bates, a blogger who linked to the newspaper's website and reproduced portions of that content on the blog, an act most possibly considered fair use.

As Rhetorica reports:

This is nonsense, of course. And it's made worse by the fact that newspapers such as the TW do the same thing every day, i.e. comment on published material.

Tulsa World responds.

Footnote: The pdf that Bates linked to in this post, has been replaced by a pdf with the message "PDF permission denied".

Update: An article in Bergens Tidene last weekend (in Norwegian only) addresses the topic about legal and illegal linking. Via "thinking with my fingers".

Army head in trouble for hiring PR firm

Hiring PR agency Burson-Marsteller might have cost the Major General Lars Johan Sølvberg, Chief of Staff for the Norwegian Army a new job, VG reports today. He was up for the job as military attaché in Washington D.C., but when it was known he had hired external advisors for a report about the army, the defence leadership changed their minds.

I'm a bit surprised that they considered it a waste of taxpayers' money to hire an external advisor. If you for some reason don't have the internal resources or for internal political reasons want an outsider to produce a report, it must be ok. But if the agency has done a poor job, that's another matter and something you should critize, but not by default rule out the possibility to hire external professionals. Now this is a more doubtful way of spending tax money on PR firms.

Why are old news more expensive than new?

In January, Dan Gillmor wrote about the idea that newspapers that currently charge a premium for access to its article archives will open the archives to the public "free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins". And last year, Adam L. Penenberg in Wired questioned the rationale behind New York Times charging $2.95 for old news while today's news are free (or at least some articles are free on the web).

When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper.

Another example of "creative" pricing of media can be found at the site www.buyandread.com where you can purchase archived copies of primarily Norwegian dailies, but also a few Swedish like Upsala Nya Tidning. Purchasing Upsala Nya Tidning in the store will cost you 12 SEK (€ 1,33) but a PDF of an old copy will set you back 18 SEK (€ 2,00) which is a 50% premium for a product that is:
- old
- already produced
- distributed at a lower cost (close to free)
- has no cost for printing
- competes with the free archive on www.unt.se

The contribution margin for an archived copy should logically be many times higher and allow for a lower price, even at a much smaller volume. It would be interesting to hear what kind of revenues UNT bring in via buyandread.com.

Loose links

Some links to interesting articles.
* First Monday - The media's portrayal of hacking, hackers, and hacktivism before and after September 11
* First Monday - New approaches to television archiving
* Newsweek: Not the Queen's English - Non-native English-speakers now outnumber native ones 3 to 1. And it's changing the way we communicate.
* Kottke in Newsweek - One of the most popular individual bloggers discusses microcelebrity and his decision to go pro.
* Richard Edelman about the power of "Average Joe" - Co-Creating and the growing power of 'average person like me': Nearly 60% of Americans and a comparable percentage of Brazilians, Brits, Canadians, Chinese, French, Germans and Japanese look to their peers for knowledge and advice, up from 20% only two years ago.
* Fast Company: Amazon cry wolf? - The down side of underpromising and overdelivering.

SVT: "The Pope is dead" - But he's not

Swedish television, SVT, yesterday announced the death of Pope John Paul II. Except, the Holy Father is still alive. Aftonbladet has the screen shot. The same thing happened to Norwegian television NRK in November when they prematurely announced the obituary of Yasser Arafat, while he was still alive.

Links via Eatfrog.

100+ subscribers

Casue for celebration. In a little more than a year since the start of this blog, it yesterday reached more than 100 subscribers in Bloglines. I also have a second feed that has an additional 26 subscribers in Bloglines. Then there are of course other news readers that for my Feedburner feed make up two thirds of the total subscribers. Here are both feeds:

http://www.kullin.net/feed/atom.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MediaCulpa

Norrköpings Tidningar launches RSS feeds

Swedish daily NT, Norrköpings Tidningar, launched a series of RSS feeds in February.

NT - Latest news
NT - Norrköping
NT - Finspång
NT - Söderköping
NT - Valdemarsvik
NT - Sport
NT - Opinion
NT - Entertainment
NT - Young NT

I've started subscribing to news from Valdemarsvik, since I have a summer house there. Unfortunately no news have yet been published in that feed.

Update: I also found that Falu-Kuriren has an RSS feed.

Falu-Kuriren - Latest news

Danish minister blogs

Jon at the E-mediator blog reports that the newly appointed Danish minister for integration, Rikke Hvilshøj of Venstre, has started a blog.

Swedish media RSS feeds reaches 100 - Nordic reaches 200

Top 10 Nordic media RSS feeds

Norway and Sweden seems to be adopting RSS feeds as a way of consuming media to a greater extent than Denmark, Finland and Iceland. Norwegian IT-Avisen is the medium in the Nordic region with most subscribers to its RSS feeds, according to my unscientific mini-study. I've been keeping a close eye on how the subscriber base for media RSS feeds in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland is developing and the numbers are growing steadily with some feeds increasing the number of subscribers with more than 50% in just 6 weeks (SR Ekot), based on number of Bloglines subscribers.

Top 10 Nordic media RSS feeds 28 Feb 2005, in terms of numbers of Bloglines subscribers.

1. IT-avisen (N) 157
2. Dagens Nyheter (S) 153
3. Digi.no (N) 151
4. Dagens Nyheter "latest news" (S) 134
5. Ny Teknik (S) 133
6. Computer Sweden (S) 118
7. Internetworld (S) 93
8. SR Ekot (S) 84
9. VG "latest news" (N) 83
10. Dagbladet "latest news"(N) 71

If anyone has information about media RSS feeds that have more subscribers please let me know.

Corporate RSS feed directory

Nooked has launched a directory for corporate RSS feeds. The directory of course has several feeds of its own. This is the feed for the Business category: http://dir.nooked.com/home.dir?location=11&outputType=rss

Mobile RSS for Swedish MP's

Richard Gatarski writes that the Swedish Riksdag (Parliament) has purchased 50 licences of doHeadlines, an RSS/newsreader for mobile devices running on the mobile operating system Symbian. According to Gatarski, all 349 members of the Swedish Riksdag have a SonyEricsson P910 and some of them should now be able to get web feeds. (Hat tip to Erik.)

Last spring 54 MP's took part in a pilot project to make them more mobile.

Doves - Some Cities

For a guy who grew up being obsessed with A Flock Of Seagulls, it's with mixed emotions I have taken yet another bird band under my wings. But Manchester's Doves are becoming one of my absolute favourite bands and my expectations on their third album "Some Cities" were extremely high, maybe too high. The new album is slower, more laid back than the previous two and lacks the kind of majestic grinding tunes like their debut EP Cedar Room or distinct pop songs like Your Shadow (Lost Sides), Caught By The River from The Last Broadcast or Catch the sun from Lost Souls. But it's a strong album nonetheless which definitely grows on you. The first single to come off the album, Black & White Town, is Doves at their best and several other songs like Sky Starts Falling are certainly up to scratch with their best work. Some compare the album with Oasis, which I think is way off the mark. Had Oasis managed to put out an album of this quality they might still be slightly interesting. "Some Cities" jumped right into the number one spot on the UK album chart this week and rightfully so, I strongly recommend it. My grade: 4/5.

Media watch site takes a pause

Mediekritik.nu, a media watch site where readers can send in comments on articles, debate and hold journalists responsible for what they write, will for some time be operated on a minimal level and the discussion forums will be closed.

The site has been up and running for three years and published 600 critical articles, but the individuals behind the site need time to evaluate and propose changes to the site. Due to these changes, Stig-Björn Ljunggren who is an expert in political science, proposes that Sweden needs a special place on the web for rebuttals, where citizens can publish an opposing view of events covered in traditional media. Personally, I feel that many blogs today serve as media watch dogs and the need for a centralized place for rebuttals is very limited. The network effect of the blogosphere probably has greater influence as a media watch dog than any single rebuttal site can have.