Category: Other

Cartoon of the day: Doonesbury on blogging.

The New York Times published an interesting article (free registration required) yesterday about the News & Record and its new experiment with participatory journalism.

“This feature, part of a planned overhaul of The News & Record’s Web site that is to begin next week, is a potent symbol of a transformation taking place across the country, where top-down, voice-of-God journalism is being challenged by what is called participatory journalism, or civic or citizen journalism.”

Several similar projects are mentioned in the article and I especially reacted to the underlying reasons for taking such initiatives.

“Nearly all newspapers have been troubled by a range of substantially similar worries: the loss of 18-to-34-year-old readers; the loss of trust in conventional news media; and the emergence of technology, especially blogs, that make it easy for ordinary people to barge into the old media’s one-way conversation.”

In my recent survey (pdf) of 600 Swedish bloggers and blog readers I found that 69.4% of all blog readers are between 16 and 35, so the approach to engage in citizen journalism seems logical. It should be an initiative that the target group is interested in.

Blogging reaches new heights. I’m interviewed in the latest issue of Clear Skies, the inflight magazine of Fly Nordic. Mark Comerford is also quoted in the article.

Stockholm Spectator’s Michael Moynihan today lashes out at artist Kanye West for having the nerve to both criticize world leaders and living a luxury life sipping Kristal at the same time.

Moynihan writes that during Live 8 “it was left to mumbling rapper Kayne West [sic!] to vent outrage at “the politicians” who “drive around in their Bentleys while Africa starves.” Then Moynihan is “shocked” when he reads an article where West complains at not being quite as rich and famous as he would want to be.

Moynihan’s reaction might have been well founded if it hadn’t been for the fact that West, while certainly living la dolce vita, also reaches out to the less fortunate. He is very active in the black community especially where the youth are concerned, by for example founding the Kanye West Foundation which is “dedicated to combating the dropout problem in the nation’s schools with compelling music programs. “Loop Dreams, the first initiative of the Kanye West Foundation, is designed to support the fight to keep instruments in the schools, and to provide opportunities for “at-risk”; students to learn how to write and produce music while simultaneously improving their academic skills.”

Maybe it’s just a small thing, maybe even too small if your net worth is in triple digits of millions of dollars, but in my book that does give West the right to criticize others who do less. And while this initiative doesn’t help the starving millions in Africa (but his appearance at Live 8 might), I bet there are other artists at Live 8 who do even less. But of course, it is difficult to fact check if you can’t spell the name of the person you are blasting. This piece of information is on the front page of www.kanyewest.com.

I didn’t think I would be able to make it, but I finally bought tickets for Berns Fusion Festival on Wednesday here in Stockholm, featuring Raphael Saadiq Moodyman and Little Brother. Any other bloggers going to this event?

Journalist Per Gudmundson must have some sort of record for most gagged blogger. His first blog was abandoned because his employer SVT did not find it appropriate for one of its journalists to express political views in a blog on his spare time. Now Zaida Catalán informs us that his second blog, that I reported about yesterday, has been stopped too. He was supposed to have an offical blog at SVT 24 to report from the political event in Almedalen. But according to Catalán, the new blog was vetoed last minute by SVT’s Director of Programming Leif Jacobsson. In retrospect, it was interesting that the only person who came up to me to talk after my (and Gudmundson’s) blog presentation to the management of SVT was Jacobsson. He told me an Oscar Wilde (I think) quote that went something like “Say it with wine, say it with pearls, but never say it in words” meaning that once you publish something in writing it will always stick with you. In the light of that quote his veto might not be a big surprise. I’m sure this is not the end of this story.