Celeb tech blogger Robert Scoble writes that news about the China earthquake broke first on Twitter. A time line of tweets can be found here.
Tags: china earthquake, twitter, jordbävning, kina. Ping.
Category: Media & Journalism
Aftonbladet launches Snack – a new community
The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet yesterday quietly launched Snack (“chit-chat”), a new community for sharing opinions, videos and photos. Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet.se, told Medievärlden that a reason behind the lauch was to move the power from anonymous whiners to people who contribute under their own name (also see blog post from yesterday). Another reason was to stimulate loyalty among readers.
Users will shortly be able to interact with the editorial content at Aftonbladet.se through article comments for example. This feature has not yet been launched.
Martin Jönsson writes that there initially seems to be a very high proportion of Aftonbladet employees among the recently registered profiles. No need yet for Facebook to get worried. Then again, Snack has just been launched and from what I can tell there has not been much marketing of the site either.
Tags: community, social networks, snack, community, aftonbladet. Ping.
Play Rapport had 50,000 viewers first day
A few days ago the Swedish public service tv SVT launched Play Rapport, a news web tv channel with streaming video. It is an online version of the news show Rapport and it will be led by legendary news anchor Claes Elfsberg. The content will focus on short news items from Sweden and the world that have a strong visual element. Today at StockholmMediaWeek SVT’s Programme Director Annie Wegelius revealed that Play Rapport had 50,000 viewers during launch day and 25,000 viewers the second day, still just a fraction of the number of tv viewers of course.
Wegelius said that there is a higher proportion of viewers that choose the web tv versions of SVT material in the drama productions than for news. SVT posts three episodes each Sunday online of the drama series Andra Avenyn which then is broadcasted on regular tv three nights in a row. One in ten viewers of Andra Avenyn watches on the web, while the ratio for news is still only one to a hundred. With the introduction of Play Rapport SVT aims to improve those stats.
SVT publishes everything they own the rights to online on SVT Play for 30 days and there are currently 2,000 shows available at SVT Play.
http://svt.se/embededflash/91198/1137654/play.swf
Footnoote: The number of viewers for Rapport dropped by 10-15 percent in January compared to the same month 2007.
Tags: web tv, webbtv, svt, play rapport, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.
Higher quality comments as readers dump anonymity
During StockholmMediaWeek this afternoon, Mattias Fyrenius from TV4 New Media and Kalle Jungkvist, Aftonbladet New Media, talked about their respective sites which are among the most visited sites in Sweden. Ljungkvist said that the typical visitor to Aftonbladet.se is well educated and visits the site several times a day. The first visit is often in the morning and readers scan most of the content of the front page in order to find stories to read. Subsequent visits are more to check if there have been any updates. Visitors are driven by two different motivations – entertainment or “value”. Entertainment includes stuff like web tv, blogs, the content that is of a more “social” nature. The value driven users are more into niche content like the travel site, the site for parental issues and so forth. Women are more frequent users of the value content than men and there is a tendency to access it more often in the evening. The site has its prime time at 8 PM.
It was also interesting to hear from MSM what many of us have been saying for quite a while, namely that journalists are no longer megaphones. Ljungkvist said that the dialogue with readers is vital and that an effect of the new channels is that readers are no longer as anonymous in their comments as they used to be, which in turn equals higher quality because people tend to be more civil when they are identifiable.
More in Swedish on the event blog.
Tags: sweden, aftonbladet, tv4, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.
Journalists are like elk hunters
I am currently at the StockholmMediaWeek event, listening to a panel debate about people who get caught in the media meat grinder. Former State Secretary Lars Danielsson is perhaps one of the Swedes who have been hurt the most in recent years after he was blamed with being the main person behind the Swedish government’s poor handling of the Asian tsunami disaster. On the stage beside Danielsson is also two experienced media consultants, Bo Krogvig of Springtime and my former colleague Paul Ronge.
Some of the more memorable advice and quotes regarding crisis management:
– PR: As long as a question remains unanswered, media will continue to dig.
– PR: compares journalists with elk hunters, they don’t hate the elk, but they don’t have very much sympathy for the dead elk either. In other words, trying to play on the journalist’s empathy for the “victim” will get you nowhere (my interpretation).
– BK: The part that is first with the truth wins.
Tags: media, crisis management, lars danielsson, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.
Aftonbladet for sale at Lidl, again?
Interesting story on Resumé, which I don’t quite get. It says that the two Swedish dailies Aftonbladet and Expressen have signed a deal with Lidl to sell their papers. I blogged a crisis story last year about Lidl being on the front page of Aftonbladet and the paper being on sale next to the check out. So apparently the papers have been sold in some stores.
Tags: lidl, lidl, aftonbladet. Ping.