Category: Media & Journalism

Progress in Swedish media’s blog approach

Swedish daily Norrbottens-Kuriren is doing something right. Today it launched a citizen journalism initiative called “Blog of the week”. A different blogger is invited to blog on the paper’s web site each week and the first blogger out is Lisen Ellard, dancer and radio journalist (how typical…).

Most previous blogging efforts from Swedish media so far has only been to add a blog to the arsenal of the paper’s regular staff of opinion makers. Or far worse, they add some sort of lame diary page without any basic blog functions (read permalinks, RSS, etc) and call it a blog. The most recent example is Dagens Nyheter’s editor in chief Jan Wifstrand’s “blog” about handball (!). I don’t want to be a blog fundamentalist, but dear Mr. Wifstrand, I hate to break this to you, but you don’t have a blog. Similarly, correspondent Thomas Hall at DN “blogs” in the same non-blog format from Germany.

But back to the positive initiative at Norrbottens-Kuriren, which makes it to #4 on the Outing-scale, i.e. Steve Outing’s 11 layers of citizen journalism. It is just one of a number of examples that show us that Swedish media are starting to grasp that citizen journalism can be more than just adding comments to online articles. For example:

– Aftonbladet is experimenting with blogs and apart from launching a series of own blogs, also interviewed a large number of bloggers during the summer, pointing to their blogs.
– SR (Swedish Radio) recently launched Bloggkrönikan, a blog review that comments on things written in the blogosphere, not by professional opinion makers but independent thinkers which make up the essence of the blogosphere.

Hopefully we will see even more advanced experiments with citizen journalism in the coming 12 months up to the next Swedish election.

DN: Gov. Blanco turned down help from Bush – or did she?

Journalist Roland Poirier Martinsson has received a “sum of money” to do a report about Swedish media and its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I’m sure he will do an excellent job, and not let his previous conclusions disturb the report. Nevertheless, I would very much like Martinsson to include these two recent articles because I reacted strongly to the way especially Dagens Nyheter portrayed a certain “fact” about Gov. Blanco.

First PM Nilsson of Expressen who writes that Blanco refused help from the White House because the state had everything under control:

“Och vi vet också att Louisianas guvernör Kathleen Blanco fem dagar efter Katrina avvisade hjälp från Vita huset eftersom hon ansåg att delstaten “hade allt under kontroll” (New York Times 8/9). Vi vet också att USA:s delstater svartsjukt bevakar sin suveränitet och att federationen USA är en ganska tunn stat inombords. Washington kan inte klampa in med trupp och nödhjälp om inte delstaten kräver det, och för en president är denna avvägning viktigare än hudfärgen på de drabbade.”

Hans Bergström of Dagens Nyheter tags along in the same lines, noting that Blanco refused to let federal organizations lead the evacuation. The headline of the article is “Guvernören sa nej när Bush ville hjälpa”, translated “The governor said no, when Bush wanted to help”:

“Så snart omfånget av katastrofen började stå klart, vände sig Bushadministrationen till delstaten Louisianas demokratiske guvernör Kathleen Blanco och bad henne begära att den federala nivån tog över ansvaret för evakueringen (enligt Associated press och New York Times). Hon vägrade, troligen utifrån traditionell benägenhet i södern, att värja sig mot maktövertagande från Washington.”

I suspect they both refer to this article from NY Times (I find it fascinating that they both make a reference to other media, for credibility, but do not provide a link so that we could check their sources for ourselves). What this article points to is that she didn’t reject federal help per se, but one specific proposal regarding how to organize the disaster relief efforts.

“After huddling with her advisers late into the night last Friday and again Saturday morning, she rejected a White House proposal to consolidate the National Guard and active duty troops in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone under a single commander appointed by the Bush administration.”

“If I had seen a greater purpose, if I had felt it would make an immediate difference, it would have been a no-brainer, but by Friday, we had everything in control,” she said in an interview in a trailer behind the state’s emergency operations center.

NY Times continues:

“She said the proposal to unify the troops under federal command amounted to bureaucratic reshuffling, when what she really needed was more resources to save lives.”

Her rejection of the proposal meant that: “…she is in control of the National Guard soldiers in Louisiana, while the president has authority over the active duty troops.”

To quote NY Times, whether her decision was best for her state remains to be seen. At least I think that PM Nilsson’s and Hans Bergström’s articles give a completely different impression of Blanco’s requests for and acceptance of federal help, especially considering, according to her own claims “she insisted that she asked for help early on in several conversations with President Bush.”

Further reading. Talking Points Memo: “…the White House has been hitting her for weeks now claiming that in various ways she dropped the ball. And that seems quite simply to be false.”

The Congressional Research Service reviewed the record to see whether Gov. Blanco took the necessary steps in a timely fashion to secure federal assistance in the face of hurricane Katrina. And she did. Full report.

“…she did take the necessary steps to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Lousiana in anticipation of the Hurricane Katrina.”

More: Jay Rosen also has some views (and raises some good questions) on the story, among other things how the Washington Post got spun by nameless sources who falsely put the blame on Blanco:

“Both Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington pointed away from backbone recovery to ask how the Washington Post allowed itself to be used by a nameless Bush official peddling the “fact” that as of Sep. 3rd, Lousiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency. (Newsweek also had it.) This turned out to be wrong. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.”

FT publishes dummy page

Financial Times, one of the world’s most respected papers, yesterday (12 Sept) published an entire page full of dummy texts like “Headline here that reflects a story about Chirac, de Villepin and that man Sarkozy” and “Chirac caption here: you can make it say as much or as little as you wantdfjdfd”. That man Sarkozy…!

The page repeats this nonsense text over and over again: “Lorum ibsum decorum upyabum and hows your father. This is dummy copy and has been created with the sole purpose of training users in the joys of producing via methode.”

FT120905

Pretty hilarious. Hat tip to Vassa eggen.

Sweden’s Yogi Berra

Dagens Nyheter today publishes two interviews (link to one out of two) with Niclas Rislund and Oisí­n Cantwell, news reporters at Swedish tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet. They write about criminal cases or disasters like the tsunami in Asia, and are sometimes accused of exploiting people in grief or using unethical journalistic methods. Rislund is currently facing charges for impersonating a police officer in order to receive information to a story.

The articles are full of great quotes. Like this one from Rislund, regarding if it is right to interview witnesses to a crime or relatives to a victim of an accident.

“Det är ju inget straff att synas i Expressen.”
(It is not a punishment to be seen in Expressen)

Or this one from Cantwell, who is a candidate for the title “Sweden’s Yogi Berra“.

“Jag vet att jag har sagt det jag påstås ha sagt.”
(I know that I have said what they say I’ve said)

It is also fascinating that none of them wants to appear with a photo in the article, because after reading the manuscript they don’t feel that the articles represent them correctly. Thus, let me give two advice to anyone who is ever approached by these two journalists:

1. Always demand to see the quotes before the article is printed.
2. Never agree to appear with a photo unless you feel the article represents you correctly, even if you have said the things they say you’ve said.

PS. You want photos? Here are some tiny ones: Rislund and Cantwell.

Expressen shuts down blogs

Swedish tabloid Expressen is closing down several of its blogs, reports Dagens Media. The political blog penned by Niklas Svensson and Cecilia Garme was shut down on Wednesday and Per Svensson decided to quit blogging because of lack of time. Expressen’s editor in chief Otto Sjöberg says that the paper has revised its blogging policy so that news reporters can’t blog.

– We want news reporters to focus on working with news, Sjöberg tells Dagens Media.

PM Nilsson hasn’t blogged since the end of July (due to a longer vacation). And since Ebba von Sydow will quit to take on a the role as editor in chief of Vecko-Revyn, her blog will not continue to be under the wings of Expressen.

Update: Niklas Svensson has already launched a new private blog about politics (looks a lot more like private stuff and gossip to me, but that may of course change). Via Nya Ordlekar. More at Dagens Media.

Footnote: The Swedish blogosphere invented the epithet “Expressen blogger” this summer and it represents a journalist that starts a blog to keep ut with things, but hasn’t grasped what it’s all about.