Benkow admits – Gates interview was fake

More on GatesGate, the Norwegian journalist Bjørn Benkow now admits that he faked interviews with Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Schumacher “to pay the rent”.

A related matter is the doctored Reuters photo from Beirut. Notice the tone and lenght of the article where Aftonbladet reports about the photoshopped photo and Reuters apology, compared to the short statement where they commented on the fake Gates interview in Aftonbladet.

Aftonbladet discredits the photographer further. Compare Aftonbladet’s comment below with the one from Reuters:

Aftonbladet: “The freelance photographer who sold the photo has previously attracted attention for selling photos of dead children in Lebanon.”

Reuters: “He was among several photographers from the main international news agencies whose images of a dead child being held up by a rescuer in the village of Qana, south Lebanon, after an Israeli air strike on July 30 have been challenged by blogs critical of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Middle East conflict.

Reuters and other news organizations reviewed those images and have all rejected allegations that the photographs were staged.”

Oh, and the next person who claims that blogs don’t influence mainstream media, is grounded:

“Reuters withdrew the doctored image on Sunday and replaced it with the unaltered photograph after several news blogs said it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more smoke.”

Tags: , , , , . Ping.

Memo about leaking leaked

Very meta. Australian police have been called in to investigate a series of leaks coming from ACT (I guess this is the Australian Capital Territory?) public servants. And in an internal memo, a chief executive of the ACT’s public service threatened his staff with jail if they leak confidential information to the media, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. But the internal memo about leaking leaked to the media. How ironic.

So we’re muppets now?

A muppet, that’s what a PR professional is to Aftonbladet’s Head of Insults, sorry, Head of Information, Olof Brundin. There is currently a kerfuffle about an interview with Bill Gates done by Norwegian journalist Bjørn Benkow on a plane between London and Munich. The following article was published in both Mann in Norway and in Aftonbladet in Sweden. Only problem is that the interview apparently is faked. After Microsoft’s Corporate Communications Manager Eirik Lae Solberg made sure the interview never happened he contacted Mann, who then apologized. But Aftonbladet, the paper that thinks “bloggers have completely different demands for truth than we do”, considers the article to be true because Benkow insists the interview is bona fide (no, really?).

– [Benkow] confirms that it all went down as he wrote in the article. If some press muppet (pressmupp) in Oslo says anything else then it is his word against the other, and I can only relate to what the reporter have told me as long as Bill Gates himself doesn’t call and says otherwise, Brundin said.

Yeah, that’s going to happen. “Well, hello mister Brundin, this is William H. Gates calling. I just sneaked out of a board meeting to have a chat with you.”

Anyway, Brundin continues to say that “if anything turns out to be wrong, we will apologize immedeately”. Except, it seems that Aftonbladet are the judges as to what is wrong and not. Later today Dagens Nyheter publishes a new article where the Swedish PR contact Johan Furestad says:

– We have called Bill Gates’ office and can conclude that [the interview] never happened. Turns out that Gates didn’t even fly a scheduled flight between these cities at that time.

Was that enough for Aftonbladet to apologize? Of course not. So, who’s the press muppet now?

UPDATE: It’s not easy being green, it’s not easy being at Aftonbladet. The muppet won, Aftonbladet apologized for the faked Gates interview.

Zidane head butt – it’s in the game

Back in town after more than three weeks in the summer house I wanted to catch up with the thousands of blog posts that lay waiting in my Bloglines account. But the Bloglines database was down and I accidentally clicked on a link that I shouldn’t have, so all my unread blog posts were erased (actually the site listed them all in a long list, but only a couple of hundred were visible). Then I realized, maybe that was for the best. I would never have had the time to sort out the good from the bad and starting the new blog season with a clean slate might take some of the blog stress of my back.

So I went and checked some of my favourite blogs and stopped by at the Media Orchard blog, always a source of amusing and inspiring stuff. They link to this new game from EA Sports, featuring Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi – the FIFA Fighter.

No, it’s not actually. It is from a Photoshop contest of video games that never got made. Some of the entries are really creative.

(v)-politician plagiarises Expressen article

I wrote in March that the Swedish Union of Journalists (SJF) called Metro’s editor-in-chief Sakari Pitkänen the “grave-digger of journalism” after initiating a project involving citizen journalists in the Stockholm region. I thought that was a bit tough on Metro, but it seems that the initiative has some quality problems regarding the origin of at least one article. Resumé can today reveal that one citizen journalist in Österåker copied an article from Expressen and published it in Metro with his own byline.

Sakari Pitkänen admits that there has been a copyright infringement and that the original writer Carl V Andersson is entitled to remuneration.

Resumé has a link to the Google cache and the original.

What Resumé fails to discover is that the citizen journalist, who is also a blogger, is a candidate for Vänsterpartiet (v), the leftist party, in Österåker. He is also a member of the board in (v) in Österåker. With that in mind one could question if the purpose of Metro’s citizen journalist project was that politicians would write articles. I think not.

Tags: , , , , .

Ring the buzzer for free stuff

Aftonbladet yesterday wrote about Buzzador and buzz marketing.

“The dream is to have access to one million buzzadors”, says Buzzador’s CEO Pär Thunström.

The article says that one of Buzzador’s main role models is BzzAgent in the US. “Their experience is that most agents don’t even take the gifts they have earned.” Well, apparently everything at BzzAgent isn’t working properly. A few weeks back the company announced that they “will expel up to 10,000 “pests” – or BzzAgent community members who have violated the company’s terms of service”.

Also, BlogRelation has a good story about when Buzzador’s marketing goes wrong.