This is a new and innovative (or weird, if you wish) way of using blogs in PR. Almega, an organisation that supports service companies in Sweden, has its own blog and Almega today issued a press release to promote a blog post. Sounds like the blog isn’t the right channel for this message if you need to support it with a press release, but then again, it made me go and read it…
“You’re not God anymore”
Quote of the day, Richard Edelman to media: “You’re not God anymore”. Edelman talks in the New York Observer about the rise of the PR industry and the relationship between business and media in a blog-enabled world.
“It used to be I would schmooze you and I was your flack,” said Mr. Edelman, whose firm netted about $260 million in 2005. “Today, if we want to get a message into the public’s conversation, we just make a post on a blog. If The Wall Street Journal goes after a client, we don’t have to accept that anymore. Let’s post the documents we gave The Journal; let’s show the interviews the newspaper decided not to show.”
Related: Jeff Jarvis hopes for the “death of the gatekeeper” (also PR professionals in the role as gatekeepers).
Tags: edelman, pr, public relations.
State of the News Media 2006
The report State of the News Media 2006 is out and it identifies six major trends:
– The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories.
– The species of newspaper that may be most threatened is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century.
– At many old-media companies, though not all, the decades-long battle at the top between idealists and accountants is now over.
– That said, traditional media do appear to be moving toward technological innovation — finally.
– The new challengers to the old media, the aggregators, are also playing with limited time.
– The central economic question in journalism continues to be how long it will take online journalism to become a major economic engine, and if it will ever be as big as print or television.
Swedish media about Richard Florida
Swedish media aren’t entirely buying Richard Florida’s praise of Sweden as the most creative country on the planet . Below are a some links (in Swedish) to articles about Florida’s recent visit to Sweden.
Dagens Nyheter
Expressen
Göteborgs-Posten 1 and 2
Stockholm City
Svenska Dagbladet 1 and 2
Sydsvenskan
It’s probably not related, but I found this to be an interesting survey, a new study on countries and national pride. Sweden is at the very bottom of the 33 countries surveyed.
Americans and Venezuelans lead the world in national pride by Smith and Kim. In the report, Smith and Kim write: Sweden’s low placement reflects the fact that Swedes tend to associate national pride with nationalistic extremism and racism.
Except when it comes to sports, that is…
Technorati tags: Richard Florida, Sweden.
Dave Winer quits blogging
Blog pioneer Dave Winer will quit blogging. “Blogging doesn’t need me anymore.”
Metro involves readers OhmyNews-style
Free daily Metro will launch 26 new local web sites, one for each municipality in the Stockholm region. 50-60 volunteers will be recruited to write short articles and take photos from their area. Sakari Pitkänen, editor-in-chief at Metro, expects to fill the void from larger Stockholm-based newspapers that are not reporting from the suburbs.
The “citizen reporters” will get paid depending on how high in the hierarchy an article will make it, the highest level being the “dead-tree version” of Metro.
Pitkänen tells Dagens Media that the new reporters will get a crash course in journalism and that he is not afraid of the quality because he hopes the collective will monitor itself.
The project will start recruiting next week and launch in the beginning of May.
Tags: metro, citizen journalism, ohmynews.