Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s Journalisten - a role model for UK journalism trade titles?

Kristine Lowe asks, is there a business model in covering the media for the media?:

(Disclaimer: Kristine works part-time for the Norwegian journalism magazine and website Journalisten and has previously contributed to Press Gazette and NA24 Propaganda)

Recording the miserable state of our industry, and listening to experts predicting its imminent death, is a daily plight for media hacks in the western hemisphere.

Newspaper readership for one seems to be in perpetual decline, a fact often bemoaned by the media columnist.

However, a recent article in MediaGuardian by former Press Gazette editor Ian Reeves suggests that the UK’s journalism trade titles, such as the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) The Journalist magazine and Press Gazette, are faced with an audience of hacks, who have lost the appetite for news about their own.

“You’ll never make money out of journalists,” Reeves quotes Haymarket’s Michael Heseltine as saying.

Yet that is exactly what the Norwegian equivalent of The Journalist does.

Journalisten.no recorded £1.4 million in revenues in 2007, despite competition from Kampanje (Campaign) - a trade magazine that also covers PR and marketing; NA24 Propaganda - a dedicated media news site; and the media sections of national and regional newspapers.

Roughly £800,000 of this came from advertising and £300,000 from subscriptions, leaving the magazine and news site, which are published by The Norwegian Union of Journalists (NJ), with a post-tax profit of £104,000.

Hardly enough for the hardened business world, but more than enough to justify the existence and further expansion of a ‘local newspaper’ for the country’s journalists.

The news site had 11,000 unique Norwegian-based visitors last week, while the main benefactors of the bi-weekly magazine are around 10,000 union members, who receive it as part of their union membership.

Other than union members, the magazine does have about 1,000 subscribers in the corporate and NGO sector, but not much has been done to market it to a broader audience recently.

The key to Journalisten’s revenues has been capturing the job classifieds market for media jobs, which is easier said than done in a more fragmented market such as the UK. Another minor stream of revenue for Journalisten is a database of PR contacts.

But Journalisten is hardly an isolated example: US-based media site Mediabistro, which also earns money from freelance listings, membership fees and training, must have had a decent turnover to have made it a worthwhile acquisition for Jupiter Media.

Swedish Résumé, owned by Swedish media giant Bonnier, is another contender with 15,000 unique visitors per day online and 29,000 readers per week for its magazine.

These are just two examples which spring to mind here and now, does anybody have other suggestions?

Tags: dedicated media news site, Ian Reeves, Kristine Lowe, Michael Heseltine, Nation Union of Journalists, Norway, Press Gazette, The Journalist, United Kingdom

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Berlingske Tidende - using crime maps for journalism

As the UK government announces plans for crime maps for offences in England and Wales, Kristine Lowe reports for Journalism.co.uk on how Danish paper Berlingske Tidende is using its own map as a source of news and a public service.

“Crime mapping is getting government push behind it, even if police are resisting,” wrote the Guardian’s technology editor Charles Arthur this week, as the government announced plans to publish local interactive crime maps for every area in England and Wales by Christmas.

In Denmark the national daily Berlingske Tidende is already pioneering the use of crime maps as part of the newsgathering process.

With the help of its readers, the paper has created an interactive crime map detailing how well the police responds to calls from the public.

“We have just had a major police reform here in Denmark and decided to investigate how this has worked. The politicians promised more police on the streets and more money to solve crime. We thought the best way to check the reality of these promises was to get our readers to tell us about their experiences,” Christian Jensen, editor-in-chief of Berlingske, told Journalism.co.uk.

The reader reports are placed on a Google map of the country and, since its launch in May, 70 crimes have been reported and plotted.

One of the crimes reported to the map related to the alleged murder of Danish woman Pia Rönnei.

Despite available patrols in the area, the police force did not send officers to investigate calls from neighbours, who reported screams and loud bangs from an apartment that Rönnei was in - something it has been forced to apologise for after the publicity the story received.

“In classic journalism, it is the journalists who find the stories. In our new media reality, it can just as well be the readers who alert us to issues they are concerned about,” said Jensen.

The newspaper has had two full-time reporters devoted to the project, and used an online journalist, photographer and production company (for live pictures) in stories they have devoted additional space to.

“We encourage people to get in touch with stories both in our paper edition and online, as we see a substantial increase in web traffic when we draw attention to the project in the paper edition,” Jensen explained.

Every single crime report on the map generates the same amount of web traffic as breaking news, he added.

The project has been so successful that the newspaper is preparing to launch another project in the same vein. In the next few days Berlingske will unveil a database on immigration politics, where readers can tell their own stories and read and comment on each others’ accounts of their experiences with immigration authorities.

But the biggest challenge for the paper has been verification:

“That is what makes this complicated. Our journalists read through all the reports to check their credibility, but we do not have the resources to verify every single detail. That has made it even more important to clarify from the outset that we are only reporting what the readers have told us.”

Tags: Berlingske Tidende, Charles Arthur, Christian Jensen, Denmark, Kristine Lowe, Pia Rönnei, UK government

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging

Kristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the demand for celebrity bloggers in Sweden.

Swedish lifestyle sites are using celebrity bloggers to drive traffic and to help lure attractive advertisers to their sites.

Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman (below) recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, in search of a pay per click deal.

Schulman is big news in the Swedish blogosphere. She is married to one of the nation’s most successful bloggers (neither known for mincing their words, hence the name of her blog), her husband is also part of a family that is old, aristocratic and influential in its own right.

She told the Swedish media: “I only work on commission. Four pence per unique visitor per month,” and promised to deliver nothing short of 120,000 visitors to any potential site wanting to host her blog.

It’s a far cry from the digital era sweatshop described by The New York Times.

She was eventually hired by Sthlmsfinest.com, a website and online community focused on celebrities and a direct competitor of Stureplan, which is a general lifestyle magazine and site born out of Stockholm’s club scene.

“We have seen a 15,000 increase in visitors just in the couple of days Katrin has been blogging here. She has a lot of readers,” Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of Sthlmsfinest, told Journalism.co.uk.

All the bloggers the site hired by Sthlmsfinest.com to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends have to bring in their own audiences, Erwik added.

He also said that he hoped that in just two weeks hiring Schulman would have brought a substantially traffic increase from 70,000 users to around 100,00 readers to the site.

Tags: Alexander Erwik, Journalism.co.uk, Katrin Schulman, Kristine Lowe, lifestyle site, online community, pence, potential site, Stockholm, Sweden, the New York Times

Online Journalism Scandinavia: VG online awarded investigative prize for biggest ever multimedia project

Kristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at a groundbreaking multimedia project run by VG newspaper that led to awards recognition.

Journalists from Norway’s VG online were last week awarded an investigative prize for developing the newspaper’s biggest ever multimedia project.

VG journalists Anne Stine Saether and Anders Sooth Knutsen were presented with the Skup-diploma for investigative journalism for their online project on domestic killings.

“In contrast to other countries, we did not know how many women were killed by their husbands, partners and boyfriends in Norway,” said the jury who awarded the prize.

“VG’s project required extensive research, meticulous accuracy and careful ethical considerations. Wounds had to be ripped open, next of kin contacted and identification approved for 72 murders committed over a period of seven years.”

On 12 November 2007, the print edition of VG dedicated its front page (above) to portraits of women killed by their men.

The story was planned and executed across all platforms simultaneously, the paper’s front page splash was accompanied by a dedicated website with articles, blogs, chats and a series of video interviews with some of the murderers, next of kin, psychologists and academics on VGTV.

“The idea for the project came as a result of my own anger and feeling of impotence half a year ago. Yet another woman had been murdered and the story was buried far back in the newspaper, I thought, dammit, this happens all the time, which lead to the idea to spray the front page with the faces of women who’d suffered such a fate,” said Kjersti Sortland, the managing editor of the award-winning journalists.

She explained that it was a very simple journalistic idea, but it required massive research. VG started with anonymous homicide statistics and large blank Excel sheets, and used all the archives and registers they could access to produce the multi-media project.

It eventually took half-a-year to complete to project. But it was worth it, VG’s coverage of the issue was groundbreaking and eventually led to a change in how murders are reported in Norway.

The government has pledged to map domestic murders, and from 2007 on, Norwegian police began registering the relationship between the murderer and the victim when reporting crimes of this nature.

Tags: Anders Sooth Knutsen, Anne Stine Saether, Kjersti Sortland, Kristine Lowe, multi-media project, Norway, Norwegian police, Online Journalism Scandinavia, online project

Online Journalism Scandinavia: lessons in UGC, follow the crowd

Kristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the (weird and wonderful) challenges of soliciting readers’ contributions.

Local newspaper readers more keen to submit photos of their own kids than of world champions, that’s what one online newspaper in Norway found out last month.

Mecom-owned Drammens Tidende (DT) invited its readers to help them cover this year’s World Cup Ski Sprint in Drammen, but found their readers were more interested in the Children’s Ski Cup that took place a day prior to the international event.

(Reader-submitted picture (above) and the pro snap (below) - both courtesy of DT)

“In retrospective, we might have done better to put more of our resources into soliciting pictures from the Children’s Cup,” said Geir Arne Bore, editor-in-chief of DT, a Norwegian regional newspapers headquartered in Drammen.

“The traffic to our news site doubled on the day of the World Cup, and the shots submitted by readers garnered quite some interest, but people were particularly interested in viewing and submitting pictures from the Children’s Cup.

“Our experiences confirm the general impression which is taking root in Norwegian media: user generated content does not come unsolicited, and if it does come it is on issues people are very passionate about, or as a result of substantial marketing.

“I guess you could say this in line with the trend described in ‘The state of the news media 2008′,” Bore added.

DT is one of the early testers of ‘The Readers Newspaper’, an online portal where readers can upload text, pictures and video. It’s developed by Edda Media, Mecom’s Norwegian arm, and is still in Beta.

So far, DT’s readers have mostly uploaded text and pictures about entertainment events, while Budstikka.no, another early tester, has attracted more content about local sports events.

The portal is expected to be rolled out to all of Edda Media’s regional and local papers over the coming months.

Tags: Arne Bore, Drammen, DT, Geir Arne Bore, Kristine Lowe, local sports events, news media, news site, Norway, Online Journalism Scandinavia, online portal

Online Journalism Scandinavia: More news sites using Twingly to link to blog reactions

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia looks again at news sites linking to blogs.

Dagbladet.no, the online operation of Norway’s second biggest tabloid, has become the latest Scandinavian news site to use Twingly to show blog links to articles on the site.

Dagladet.no has been experimenting with Twingly since October last year, but last week announced that Twingly would now become the standard across the site.

However, the online newspaper said that articles dealing with very sensitive issues - those concerning murder, suicide and death - would not not have the technology applied to them.

“Our experiences with Twingly so far are very positive. There are so many interesting things happening in the blogosphere, and we think it is important that our readers can converse in their own rooms and extend the debate about our articles there,” Mina Hauge Naerland, a journalist involved with the implementation, told Journalism.co.uk.

“It’s also very interesting for us to be able to follow those conversations, it helps us improve our journalism.”

Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark’s leading newspapers, started using Twingly a month ago, and the online operations of two of Sweden’s most influential newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, have used Twingly for about a year.

Tags: Dagens Nyheter, Denmark, Journalism.co.uk, Kristine Lowe, media industry, Mina Hauge Naerland, news site, Norway, online newspaper, online operation, online operations, Scandinavian news site, Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. More »

Tags: Bjarne Andre Myklebust, Eirik Solheim, Kristine Lowe, Mark Comerford, media developer, media industry, Norway, NRK, online audience, online division, online team, online traffic, public broadcaster, read news site, social media, social network, Spain, Sweden, Torry Pedersen, United Kingdom, United States, VG, week Online Journalism Scandinavia, YouTube

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Danish news sites benefit from doing things ‘The Drupal Way’

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Here she looks at use of open-source software, Drupal, on Danish news sites. More »

Tags: content management, content management system, content management systems, Denmark, Drupal, free open-source software, GBP, in-house developer, Kristine Lowe, media industry, niche site, Nikloaj Opstrup, Nikolai Thyssen, open software, open software solutions, open-source software, plug and play, similar solutions, technology appealing, United Kingdom, United States, web hacker-geeks