The fine art of giving credit like a slap in the face

Oooooh how hard it is for mainstream media to credit bloggers with a scoop. Aftonbladet’s Helle Klein posts about blogger Magnus Ljungkvist’s scoop on her blog at Aftonbladet.se:

“(En av de första som påpekade detta var bloggaren Magnus Ljungkvist)”

“(One of the first to point this out was blogger Magnus Ljungkvist)”

Well, that’s the closest we’ve seen so far to giving the right credit to Magnus (I understand that Aftonbladet would not want to credit competitor Expressen, unless they really really had to). But he wasn’t one of the first. He was the first. The first. And not by minutes but by almost one day. It’s not very hard to prove, you just need to check his RSS feed to find that out.

If you are going to give someone credit for his scoop of the year, then do it properly, not with a “von oben” attitude like “I don’t really have to do this, but I’ll be nice this time”.

More in my previous post.

Update: Lena Mellin does the right thing and writes about Magnus’ story in today’s Aftonbladet. Well done, Lena!

“Familjen Borelius inkomster avslöjades för övrigt av s-bloggaren Magnus Ljungkvist, pressekreterare i Stockholms läns landsting och tidigare medarbetare till demokratiminister Britta Lejon.
Bloggen håller på att bli
politikens skarpaste verktyg.
Den har redan skördat offer.”

[Hat tip to Clas for the link.]

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Bloggers beat big media #2

My friend and former colleague Magnus Ljungkvist has done some journalistic digging regarding Sweden’s new Minister for Trade, Maria Borelius. She confessed that she had hired a cleaing woman in the 90’s without paying the proper payroll taxes. Borelius claimed that she otherwise shouldn’t have afforded to pay for the services. The story broke on Saturday and yesterday Magnus published his blog post about the matter where he reveals that Borelius in fact had a much higher income than the average Swedish woman. He updated his investigation later the same day by adding the income for Borelius husband which clearly reveals that their income during the decade totalled more than 16 million kronor.

His investigative reporting immediately gained positive responses in the blogosphere. But mainstream media weren’t interested in his sensational findings. Magnus told me that he had pitched the story to Aftonbladet who had declined to report about it.

But today, Expressen is pretending that they have the scoop of the week when they write about the same topic, one day later than Magnus.

“Expressen kan i dag avslöja att Maria Borelius och hennes man tillsammans tjänade över 16 miljoner kronor under 1990-talet.”

“Expressen today reveals that Maria Borelius and her husband earned more than 16 million kronor during the 1990’s.”

And other media were quick to follow suit (1, 2, 3 and 4 to take some examples). LO-tidningen re-writes the story without crediting either Magnus or Expressen (!)

There are two possible scenarios.

1) Reporters at Expressen read Magnus’ post and stole his story without giving him credit.
2) Expressen were already working on the same story but Magnus beat them to the scoop, proving that bloggers can fill a vital roll in investigative journalism, sometimes even better than MSM.

Either way, credit where credit’s due. This was a scoop from the blogosphere and none of the mainstream media noticed this fact, or worse, noticed and ignored it. Maybe it’s time that news editors update their RSS feeds subscriptions (if they have any).

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Link love from Boing Boing missing

I’ve always had a thing for lists and rankings. When I was younger I used stay up late and scribble down the UK top 40 chart on a noisy 1440 kHz Radio Luxembourg. It was a great way to discover new music and I especially recall hearing the brilliant “Telegraph” by the Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark for the first time, a very hard band name to catch, especially at the low volume I had to use not to disturb my parents. But this was not supposed to be a post about old New Romantic classics, no, I wanted to raise a question about the Technorati rankings that I follow like a paparazzi after Paris Hilton. I have noticed that Technorati does not register all incoming links to my blog and I am sure that there are a number of reasons for that, like for example that they are published on some obscure local blog platform from a tiny north European country. I understand that there are a large number of blogs that Technorati simply does not track (yet). No problem with that.

What I don’t get is why an incoming link from Boing Boing, the second most linked blog on the planet, does not show up in my Technorati cosmos? That’s like a thing that goes into your CV, so obviously I’d like that to show up. The first time Media Culpa got link love from Boing Boing, it was registered, so something must have changed at either Technorati or Boing Boing.

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PR blunder of the week

Few things are so instructive as reading about people in your own profession that screw up. And pitching bloggers is an art form few are able to master. Like in this example, in natural irritable Gawker style.

“How Not to Send Things to Gawker Stalker”

On my home turf, this would probably have to be named PR blunder of the week. Peter Eriksson, spokesperson for the Swedish Green Party, lashed out at Leif Johansson, the CEO of Volvo, for its decision not to continue to produce bi-fuel cars. Problem was that Johansson is CEO of AB Volvo, not Volvo Cars which was sold to Ford in 1999. Ouch.

– It would be nice if politicians on this level could tell one company from another. After all, AB Volvo is Sweden’s largest company, a press contact at Volvo commented.

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