Tag: Expressen

“Expressen-blogger” used to be an invective

I’ve been away for a week of alpine skiing and I’m ready to pick up the blog again. Here are a few things worth mentioning from the last week.

– Blog Buzz Helps Companies Catch Trends in the Making. [Via Marcus]

“By trawling in cyberspace, ConAgra sensed that consumer interest in portable snack foods is growing as people’s schedules get busier, the kind of intelligence that helps guide expensive decisions on research and development of new products.”

– Jay Rosen has a new project called Blue Plate Special. In the first issue he and a group of students have studied the Best Blogging Newspapers in the U.S. Top six are:

1. Houston Chronicle (128 points)
2. Washington Post (69 points)
3. USA Today (38 points, 1 honorable mention)
4. St. Petersburg Times (29 points, 2 honorable mention)
5. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (23 points)
6. San Antonio Express-News (22 points, 1 honorable mention)

– Readers have started 700 blogs just a few days after Expressen launched its blog service. It’s interesting to see that some established bloggers have launched mirror blogs on Expressen.se just to increase traffic to the “real blog”. What happened to the tabloids-are-evil standpoint? (And remember in 2005 when Expressen-blogger was an invective?)

Expressen starts local vodcasts

Swedish tabloid Expressen today launched a series of vodcasts, or pod-tv feeds. SVT announced earlier this week that it will launch pod-tv on Monday, but Expressen managed to beat SVT.

Four local daily shows will be available for video mp3-players or for viewing on a PC: Stockholm, Göteborg, Skåne region and Östergötland region.

Stockholm: http://extra.expressen.se/podcast/stockholm.xml

Göteborg: http://extra.expressen.se/podcast/goteborg.xml

Skåne: http://extra.expressen.se/podcast/skane.xml

Östergötland: http://extra.expressen.se/podcast/ostergotland.xml

Technorati tags: vlog, vodcast, media, video blog television.

Expressen shuts down blogs

Swedish tabloid Expressen is closing down several of its blogs, reports Dagens Media. The political blog penned by Niklas Svensson and Cecilia Garme was shut down on Wednesday and Per Svensson decided to quit blogging because of lack of time. Expressen’s editor in chief Otto Sjöberg says that the paper has revised its blogging policy so that news reporters can’t blog.

– We want news reporters to focus on working with news, Sjöberg tells Dagens Media.

PM Nilsson hasn’t blogged since the end of July (due to a longer vacation). And since Ebba von Sydow will quit to take on a the role as editor in chief of Vecko-Revyn, her blog will not continue to be under the wings of Expressen.

Update: Niklas Svensson has already launched a new private blog about politics (looks a lot more like private stuff and gossip to me, but that may of course change). Via Nya Ordlekar. More at Dagens Media.

Footnote: The Swedish blogosphere invented the epithet “Expressen blogger” this summer and it represents a journalist that starts a blog to keep ut with things, but hasn’t grasped what it’s all about.

Blogs can be more than “online diarrhea”

A popular misconception among some mainstream media is that blogs are just online diaries, so blogs are a fad. Blogs are a waste of time. Who wants to read all these stories about what people had for breakfast and at what time they walked their dog? Like this quote from a column in Sundsvalls Tidning about journalist Per Svensson at Expressen and his new blog (are bad journo blogs giving the rest of us a bad rep?).

“Alla pratar men har inget att säga.
Alla informerar men ingen vet någonting.
Alla vill bli författare men ingen är ett skit intresserad av litteratur.”

Everyone talks but no-one has anything to say. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Just because there are so called cat blogs out there (not that there’s anything wrong with that…), doesn’t mean that all blogs are the same. And as always, Amy Gahran at the Contentious blog says it so much better than me. “Too often, blogs are primarily described or defined as personal online diaries.” They can be online diaries, but often they are not.

Gahran lists 6 blog myths and stereotypes to avoid. I especially like this one. “Weblogs are personal diaries, usually amateurish”. Gahran writes “Well, that’s like saying most of the universe is hydrogen and dust. Yeah, BUT: There are galaxies and black holes and planets and nebulae, too. Which would you rather focus on?”