Category: Other

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.

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“.

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

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 😉

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.

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.