Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Coverage of blogs in Swedish media continue to rise and hit new record levels (irony intended, see previous post). There were a total of 28 articles in Swedish media about blogs during May, several of them reporting on Bill Gates comments about blogs. IT and technology press make up half of this number, while marketing and journalism press are still silent. Source: online publications via a Retriever search.
Editorsweblog.org reports about a debate during the World Editor’s Forum. According to the article, Dean Wright, Editor-in-Chief and Vice President, MSBNC.com, and Jean-Louis Cebrián, Chief Executive Officer of PRISA Group and EL PAÍS, agreed that the newspaper “editor’s role becomes more important” in a new media environment in which news can be produced and disseminated through online means such as blogs.
Online Journalism Review reports about blogger Robert Cox who tried to get The New York Times to get a correction in the paper. He tried everything, but in the end, it was his parody of the Times’ correction page – and the overreaction from the Times’ legal department – that got the newspaper to change its policy.
Link via Dan Gillmor.
I was reading this post on Whatsnextblog about how disgruntled former employees use the internet for revenge. A few minutes later I stumbled onto this website, saabdisaster.com, which is a blog that was “created because Saab Sweden and it’s agent in South Africa are having big problems for the last six months, and we, Saab owners, are the victims of that!” There seems to be at least 17 Saab owners committed to the blog and they claim to have had 9000 visitors during the last week.
The initial reaction is of course that this is a public relations disaster for Saab in South Africa, but because of the viral nature of blogs, these things have a tendency to spread. One post was made on the subject in a discussion forum at UK Saab owners club and traditional media reported about the site too. One wonders if Saab has a strategy in place to monitor if and how this spreads through the blogosphere?
For the record I have a Saab 9-5 and I’m very satisfied with it, but then again, I’m not in South Africa.
Media Monitoring News from Cyberalert writes that the number of blogs about public relations are expanding and they have found about 70 e-mail newsletters, blogs and online publications about PR. The best in Sweden so far is the corporate blog of PR agency JKL.