Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Swedish business magazine Att:ention will be integrated with Veckans Affärer and only be published twice a year. But Attention, the member magazine for the association of people with neurophysiological functional disorders, is still alive and kicking.
“Den dagen bloggar fäller en riksdagsledamot eller minister är bloggen etablerad”. Johan Norberg, Bloggforum 2004.
“The day blogs bring down a member of the parliament (Riksdag) or a Minister, then the blog has become established”. Johan Norberg, Bloggforum 2004.
That day is today. Sweden’s new Minister for Trade, Maria Borelius, today resigned, after a series of negative articles that took off after a blogger, Magnus Ljungkvist, revealed some startling facts about her and her husband’s income during the 90’s. Borelius only lasted a record short period of 8 days as Minister.
Background to the story here and for example here.
Update: Aftonbladet gives Magnus the recognition he deserves. Expressen still pretend it’s their gig.
I reacted to the new tv commercial from Siba, a Swedish retailer of electronics equipment. It sounded like a complete rip-off from Avis’ classic pay-off “We try harder“. Siba’s new pay-off is “Är man inte störst så får man anstränga sig mer” or in English, “If you’re not the biggest, you need to try harder”.
After a bit of search on the net, I see that others have commented about this too, here and in the comments to this article at Resumé. Apparently Siba has been criticized before for plagiarising Apple’s “Switch” commercials.
Tags: advertising, Avis, reklam, Siba. Ping.
Done that, been there, etc. Blogger Beta Alfa 2.0 yesterday illustrated his blog post about the new ministers that didn’t pay their tv licenses, with a reference to a classic tv commercial. In the commercial, people who didn’t pay their license get a snail on their eye.
Today, Metro (large pdf) does the same.
There is a story online today about the “Lesotho Promise“, the biggest diamond to be found in 13 years, which was sold on Monday for about $12 million. Many of the articles are illustrated with photos of the mega-diamond and if you check Yahoo News, you find at least 11 photos that the editors could choose from. The interesting thing is that you can get a feel of whether the papers chose the “best” photo or not, since users have voted for their favourite pics. The 11 photos got this many votes so far:
Pic 1: 1587 votes
Pic 2: 69 votes
Pic 3: 116 votes
Pic 4: 105 votes
Pic 5: 88 votes
Pic 6: 67 votes
Pic 7: 130 votes
Pic 8: 100 votes
Pic 9: 91 votes
Pic 10: 202 votes
Pic 11: 150 votes
Dagens Nyheter and Ekonominyheterna chose photo no 9 with only 91 votes while Dagens Industri (photo on front page, not in the article) used a photo that is similar (but not identical) to photo no 1, the most popular photo by far. Should that indicate that Dagens Industri picked the best photo? Well, maybe you shouldn’t always give people what they want, but admit that it is a fun test. And I wonder if Yahoo News have illustrated their article with photo no 1 because it got the most votes? If so, it’s a nice example of how you can include readers in the production of news.
Oh, and by the way. BBC got their (web tv) reports from no other than – Jonny Dymond:
“The diamond, about the size of a golf ball, is the 15th largest ever discovered. Jonny Dymond reports from Belgium.”
Tags: diamonds, photography, foto, nyheter. Ping.
On 4 October, Dagens Nyheter started podcasting. Johan Åkesson at DN På Stan talks every Thursday about music and entertainment. The first podcast is a 12 minute piece about for example Japanese music and Swedish band Koop. Marit Bergman is interviewed as well. The sound quality is not quite up to top radio standard yet, but apart from that I think it worked out nicely.
RSS feed here.