Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
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 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.
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)
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.
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’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?