Dagens Nyheter and Metro hires gatekeeper for press releases

Dagens Nyheter has signed an agreement with Newsdesk where the paper is paying Newsdesk to “manage all distribution of press information to Dagens Nyheter’s all news desks, editors and reporters”. Metro has signed a similar agreement, according to Resumé.

– We will sort the material in a relevant way for DN, says Kristofer Björkman at Newsdesk.

In a sales letter from DN and Newsdesk, press contacts are asked to send all press releases to a central email address at Newsdesk, but Newsdesk clarifies in an interview that it is still an acceptable procedure to send press releases directly to journalists.

I can understand that individual journalists might need help in filtering the flood of emails that are being sent to them, but I have some doubts as to whether this is the right method. But maybe I have completely misunderstood the purpose of this agreement?

Having worked almost a decade in PR I can tell that press releases rarely get picked up by journalists you have absolutely no relation to. What will happen is that PR practitioners will add the central address to their mailing lists and still continue to send press releases to their regular journalist contacts. PR people don’t want another layer between themselves and their audience. It is “bad enough” with having journalists as gatekeepers. Now the gatekeeper hires a gatekeeper? I’m not so sure. I prefer to look in the opposite direction by experimenting with a direct dialogue with the target audience as a complement, via blogs and RSS for corporate information.

Dagens Nyheter censors article about Peter Borgström

Journalist Oivvio Polite today wrote a story about Bloggforum that took place on Monday night. It was published in Dagens Nyheter’s culture section, the very one that Peter Borgström wrote for. He was critized earlier this year by Stockholm Spectator for plagiarizing articles from the New York Times.

When Polite wrote his article, it contained a sentence about Borgström, but DN deleted that sentence without informing Polite. The sentence is in the middle of the article, so it cannot have been taken off because of lack of space.

His original text, published on his own webpage:

“What have for example all non-blogging journalist got to hide? A lot, if you should believe the blogger that revealed that DN journalist Peter Borgström had been borrowing a bit too much from the New York Times.

In Swedish:

“Vad har till exempel alla ickebloggande journalister att dölja? En hel, om man skall tro bloggaren som avslöjade att DN-journalisten Peter Borgström lånat lite väl flitigt ur New York Times.

The last sentence, in italics, had been erased by DN. The entire article is available on Polite’s webpage in Swedish.

Link via Gustav Holmberg.

UPDATE: DN answers to critisism in Journalisten.

Accusations of plagiarism at Dagens Nyheter

I mentioned earlier an article in Axess about blogs as media watchdogs. Here is a brilliant example, maybe the most ambitious of its kind in Sweden so far. Since it is in English I thought I would share the link.

Stockholm Spectator accuses Dagens Nyheter of plagiarism and claim that a reporter have copied at least four articles from the New York Times without giving the original author or the paper any credit. The full story here is quite interesting and contains correspondence between The Spectator and the editor of DN Kultur (DN Culture). The story is now spreading across the blogosphere and it doesn’t seem that DN are willing to do a media culpa, which leads me to believe that we haven’t heard the end of it yet. To be continued.

Link via Erik Stattin.