Online Journalism Scandinavia: Investigative journalism conference was conference 1.0, says high-profile blogger

Some 500 investigative journalists from 86 different countries descended on Lillehammer, Norway, for the Global Investigative Journalism conference (GIJC) last week, but hardly any used social media to report live from the event.

Isaac Mao, who is often referred to as China’s first blogger (pictured right) and has watched bloggers slowly changing China’s media landscape for the better, found the absence of livebloggers and users of microblogging sites such as Twitter surprising.

‘Social media should redefine journalism’
“I wish 20 per cent here would twitter rather than just one, as it makes twittering from a conference more interesting. I think the group here is really big, but I have seen three guys open Skype, and no-one, other than you, have the Twitter-screen open,” Mao told me.

The high-profile blogger and social entrepreneur thinks blogs should redefine the landscape of journalism and how broad it really is, by enabling readers to participate more in traditional media.

He is firmly of the opinion that media should not be the exclusive domain of a few prestigious journalists.

“It is like The Global Shining Light Award which was awarded here: we need everyone to be enlightened. This has been conference 1.0.  I did not want to challenge it as people need time to adjust to the new reality.”

The power of Chinese bloggers
In this new reality Mao talks about, China has some 50 million bloggers (47 million at the end of 2007). Of those, only about 20 million can be described as active, but that is more than enough to make it difficult for the Chinese government to monitor all of them effectively, said Mao, who was invited to the Lillehammer conference to talk about the power of Chinese bloggers.

Mao is the founder of CNBlog.org and Social Brain Foundation, which support numerous grassroots initiatives in China, and is an associate of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in the US.

He is also working closely with Global Voices in China, the blog network founded by Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman, and his work is particularly focused on training people in using safe ways to communicate online and empowering bloggers to do their own investigations by providing training in journalistic methods.

He thinks there has already been a great change:

“Three years ago bloggers copied traditional media, now traditional media copies bloggers. In particular, journalists do their best to steal content from lifestyle bloggers,” said Mao.

“But bloggers and journalists are not enemies to each other. In the beginning, journalists thought bloggers would steal their eyeballs, then they laughed at them; bloggers were not serious enough, not in-depth enough, now they have to cooperate with them,” said Mao.

Crossroads
China is now at an important crossroads, he says:

“We have millions of bloggers now; millions doing the same makes it tough for the government to monitor it. I am waiting for the tipping point: we are now at a crossroads. Many journalists have started their own blogs now, some even blog more than they write for the traditional media outlets they work for.

“Amateur writings occupy more and more space to try to cooperate with traditional media. The latter are unable to publish a lot of things, but they can give it to bloggers to publish,” said Mao, who hopes to see the two groups, bloggers and journalists, working together more and more.

Conference tweets: live from two international journalism events

We’re a little bit sad here at Journalism.co.uk towers that we didn’t get to go to either of this week’s major journalism conferences, the Global International Journalism Conference (GIJC) in Lillehammer, Norway and the Online News Association (ONA) in Washington DC.

But we got our web feelers out and collated these Twitters for your perusal.

Over at the ONA Twitter Search you can follow the Poynter Group, who are all twittering madly (you’ll need to create yourself an account to log in) and you can see the tweets from the first session of the morning here. The ONA has put together information about the Twitterers, discussion groups and podcasts here.

Or follow blogger supremo Pat Thornton, who was a little bit bored this afternoon…

Meanwhile over GIJC Twitterland we picked up this Tweet about Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Hajj –  imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for six years.

We’ll be back with a better summary of the conferences’ outcomes next week, when we’ve spoken to a few more participants.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Bergens Tidende asks users to map traffic hotspots

“Bergens Tidende, our local paper, has a shining example today of how a local newspaper can gather and report local news simultaneously by coordinating reader participation in a very easy-to-contribute mashup focusing on an issue of huge importance to Bergeners right now, though it’s of absolutely no wider interest”, writes Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, on her blog.

That issue is traffic: Bergen, a city on the west coast of Norway, is currently building a light rail system through Bergen, and the road works and constantly changing detours are causing major traffic problems.

“We decided to do something different to report on the exasperating traffic situation in the city, ” Jan Stian Vold of Bt.no told me.

What the news site came up with, in addition to their normal coverage, was a Google Map where readers could plot in where they encountered traffic problems.

It asked its readers: ‘Where are the bottlenecks in the Bergen-traffic? How does the construction of the light rail system effect you?’

Walker Rettberg is also rather impressed by the anti-spam measures: “You enter your mobile phone number and instantly receive an SMS with a code that you then type into the website to confirm that you’re an actual person and that you’re a different person to all the other people who’ve entered their comments,” she writes.

This works as an efficient way of identifying people as all mobile phone numbers are registered by law in Norway.

Requiring users to register does raise the threshold for participation, but this has not deterred Bergeners, as around 400 people have reported their traffic problems so far, according to Vold.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Behind the spin of Mecom’s half-year results

Even former Mirror boss David Montgomery, who has a reputation as a ferocious cost-cutter, admits his new pan-European newspaper group Mecom cannot cost-cut its way out of a recession.

Shares in the company tumbled on the London Stock Exchange last week after the newspaper group failed to impress the market with its interim half-year results.

Perhaps jittery from all the recent talk of recession, investors did not appreciate the highly geared company’s reports of ‘worsening economic conditions’.

Despite Montgomery’s assurances that his business model is very different from that of UK newspapers - with subscription rates as high as 96 per cent in some of the countries Mecom operates in - alert observers noted that advertising still makes up 52 per cent of revenue.

No more title-specific news desks?
As widely reported, this does of course mean employees at the company, already disgruntled about redundancies on the table, will have to prepare for an even tighter ship in times ahead.

But there is more to this story: in a phone conference with employee representatives last week, Montgomery is reported to have admitted the company cannot cost-cut its way out of a recession; and emphasised that new ways of working and new streams of revenue were necessary for newspapers to have a profitable future.

He specifically highlighted two areas as key to the company’s future strategy: digital expansion, where its Norwegian division, Edda Media, is leading the pack with 9 per cent of its revenues from digital operations; and the media house strategy pioneered by Lisbeth Knudsen, the CEO of its Danish operation.

As Journalism.co.uk previously reported, Knudsen has reorganised her company’s titles into ‘verticals’ that deliver copy not only across platforms, but also titles - be they broadsheet, tabloid or regional newspapers. This, apparently, is to become the standard for all future media house strategy in Mecom.

Innovation exchange
“Mecom’s German division for instance - comprised of Berliner Zeitung, a national; Netzeitung, an online-only newspaper, and various magazine titles - should pay heed to these words. This model might be seen as a good fit for Germany,” an employee representative told me.

Mecom has also established an agreement that allows all Mecom countries to exchange software solutions developed in one country to another Mecom country without charge. The Reader’s Newspaper, a citizen journalism portal previously described by Journalism.co.uk, for instance, is to be exported from Norway to Denmark and Poland.

Another Norwegian export is a new range of hyper-local websites and freesheets Mecom is launching in Poland: Moje Miastro - a concept that has been operating for some time in Norway. The newspaper group, often portrayed as cash-starved and too much in debt, has also entered into an agreement to buy Edtytor Sp. z o.o., a regional newspaper business in Olsztyn. It has told employee representatives that the Polish expansion in new products was to blame for the dip in profits from its Polish arm.

Beware the ghost of recession
In other words, keeping an eye on innovations in the various parts of Mecom’s far-flung empire, can give useful pointers to what we can expect on group level.

Unfortunately for Mecom, a less fortunate trend spreading through the many European countries the company operates in is the ghost of recession.

In this age of globalisation, operating in more than one European country is no safe hedge against a market downturn, despite Montgomery indicating otherwise.

As Peter Kirwan recently wrote in his Press Gazette blog: “[W]hen it comes to the ad recession, we’re at the end of beginning, not the beginning of the end.”

In the summer months we have seen the footprints of recession appear in new territories such as Norway and Holland, causing the job and property classifieds markets to shrink - a sure sign that worse is yet to come.

For Mecom, the question is which is strongest, which will have the final say: the ability to come up with new innovative ways of doing business with less resources, or the clammy hand of a jittery market in the throes of recession?

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?

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s Aftenposten to webcast editorial meetings

Norway’s newspaper of record, the Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, is to start webcasting parts of its editorial meetings.

Following of a newspaper debate on media transparency where American regional newspaper Spokesman-Review, which has webcast its editorial meetings since June 2006, was upheld as an ideal in terms of editorial transparency, the paper’s editor-in-chief Hans Erik Matre told attendees it was time to open up more of the editorial process to public view.

“We are considering webcasting our editorial meetings, starting this autumn. However, instances were we broadcast these live online, in full, will probably be limited,” he later told Journalism.co.uk.

“What we have concrete plans for, is publishing parts of our editorial meetings online to get feedback. This could either be to get reader perspectives on the evaluation of our stories, in retrospect, or to involve readers more upfront in the planning stage of big stories - say on healthcare.”

Steve Smith, the editor-in-chief of Spokesman-Review, visited Oslo recently. He told Journalism.co.uk webcasting editorial meetings was a minor programme in the scheme of things for the newspaper, which also use reader polls and journalist-written blogs actively.

“Our webcasts have 40-50 viewers in the morning, 20-25 in the afternoon. It’s mostly our competitors or people who have, or think they might have, a stake in what is being said. We attract few viewers simply because these are boring meetings. It’s symbolic: the fact that it is there, that it is an option, is important. We also break out pieces of the webcast and put them on blogs when we are dealing with controversial issues,” he explained.

He added: “The whole transparency costs next to nothing. The challenge is time: I would much rather spend all my time blogging than being an editor.”

In May, Liverpool Daily Post (LDP) became the first British newspaper to webcast an editorial meeting. Mark Comerford talks to LDP’s editor Mark Thomas about their “transparency” experiments here.

SFN: Norway’s online newspaper revenues reach 290 million euro - up 61 per cent in two years

Online newspapers in Norway generated nearly €290 million in 2007, up 61 per cent from about €180 million in 2005, according to the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (through SFN Blog).

Display and classified revenues increased 41.7 per cent. Search and listing up 112.5 per cent.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

Swedes are getting so hooked on social media that for many web-crazy young things reality-TV has all but moved online.

Last night Twingly, the Swedish web company that supplies a blog trackback functionality to newspapers world-wide and last week launched its international spam free blog search engine Twingly.com, aired the first programme of its new reality-series on YouTube: The Summer of Code.

YouTube reality-show
“We have recruited four ambitious interns and given them six weeks to develop a visual search engine for blogs; Twingly Blogoscope,” said Martin Källström, CEO of Twingly.

“Everyone can follow what happens in the project via daily episodes on YouTube.”

The episodes will be uploaded Monday to Friday at 6 PM GMT (10 AM in San Francisco, 19:00 in Stockholm) and the first programme aired last night.

“Openness in this project is a way to show the daily life in the office,” said Källström.

“Generally people are not familiar with the stimulating working atmosphere in a start-up. Hopefully Twingly Summer of Code will inspire more people to join Twingly or other start-ups.”

Media increasingly about conversation
Last week, Twingly launched its search engine Twingly.com to track 30 million blogs all over the world.

Despite this global scope, Källström said Twingly will concentrate on being number one in Europe, working with several different European languages.

“Google has not improved its blog search for more than two years,” he told Journalism.co.uk.

The company has teamed up with newspapers in Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and South Africa, to show blog links to the news sites’ articles.

Källström added that his hope was for Twingly to be able to take on both Google and Technorati by providing more functionality and driving traffic to bloggers via its media partnerships.

“Media is more and more about the conversation between media and its readers. We see a very strong synergy between mainstream media and bloggers and try to provide a bridge that can improve this synergy,” he said.

Blogs have replaced docusoaps
Twingly’s target group for The Summer of Code will no doubt draw an audience of uber-geeks but a young Swedish reporter recently admitted she was addicted to a very different sort of ‘web docusoap’.

Madeleine Östlund, a reporter with the Swedish equivalent of Press Gazette, Dagens Media, claimed the country’s fashion blogs had replaced docusoaps (link in Swedish).

She confessed she found it increasingly difficult to live without her daily fix of intimate everyday details and gossip from the country’s high-profile fashion bloggers, a phenomenon Journalism.co.uk has described here.

“It is not their blogging about clothes that draws me in, rather it is the surprise and fascination with which I read about these young girls’ private lives. Surprise and fascination about how much they often reveal,” she wrote, citing posts about broken hearts, hospital stays, what they had for breakfast and descriptions of a caesarian birth.

Roll on the Web 2.0 docusoap about dashing media journalists, I say.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: How to kiss 713,000 teenagers and still make a profit

Norway’s largest city is in cyberspace, and its 713 000 ‘citizens’ are generating good revenues for the newspaper that owns it.

Schibsted-owned VG.no is not only Norway’s most read and most profitable news site, it also has a social network making a nice contribution to the news site’s admirable financial results.

A city of teenagers
VG is currently earning a gross margin of more than 50 per cent from this social network, called ‘Nettby‘ (Norwegian for NetCity), Jo Christian Oterhals, head of development, VG Multimedia & chairman of Nettby Community AS, Norway, told the audience at World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference in Gothenburg last week.

The 713,000-strong city is in fact the biggest city in Norway, bigger than the capital, Oslo.

“Teenage girls are very active here, and we all know that if you get the girls, you also get teenage boys,” said Oterhals, who explained that Nettby’s 713 citizens make up for 61 per cent of all teenagers in Norway.

This demographic is obviously an attractive one for advertisers, but premium membership is also an important source of revenue. “Premium membership is really important for us now, we have more than 50,000 paying customers at any given time,” Oterhals added.

City guards key to success
Nettby is Norway’s second biggest social network after Facebook, but VG.no is not worried about the competition from the trendy website, because the users and purpose of the two social networks are so different:

“Nettby is a place you go to meet new people; on Facebook you keep up with existing friends,” Espen Egil Hansen, managing editor of VG.no, told me on a previous occasion.

Nettby is very much like a party where teenagers hang out, flirt and meet new friends.

“But you can’t just open the door, the best parties are well administered,” said Oterhals.

“That is why Nettby has city guards, volunteers who help moderate and control Nettby,” he explained, adding that these city guards were hand-picked by Nettby’s own people.

“To throw a good party you need good planning, a place, a host, basic rules, a bouncer, an invitation and a few introduction. We try to provide all this,” said Oterhals.

No recipe to make teenagers read news
“Currently there are almost no links between VG and Nettby other than the logo, as it was very important for us when we started Nettby that the kids who came in there did not get the impression that this was their fathers’ website,” said Oterhals.

In other words, Nettby has not been a recipe to get young readers reading newspapers - a topic much discussed during WAN.

Instead, Oterhals told journalism.co.uk, part of the rational for running this social network was to be part of what is happening on the web and to figure out how young readers use the web.

“What is your competitor online is not as easy to figure out online as in print – it could be Google, it could be Facebook - so we stay awake at night thinking about what the next big thing will be, who our new competitors are,” he said

VG.no has also launched the site in Sweden, where it failed due to many Norwegian teenagers hanging out there, and more recently in Spain, where it is an add-on to the online operation of 20 Minutos, Schibsted’s Spanish freesheet.

“Analysts said Nettby’s success will last for six years max, so the challenge for us is to look at how can we repackage and launch it as new products. I think that will be our strategy for the future,” said Oterhals.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: “Computer programming is journalism”

Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at innovate use of Google mash-ups and online databases by the Norwegian press.

“Computer programming is also journalism,” Espen Andersen, the man charged with bringing the current affairs flagship of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) kicking and screaming into the internet age, told Journalism.co.uk.

He should know. Andersen is one of Scandinavia leading practitioners in mashing-up news and creating new and compelling methods for ‘doing journalism’.

Aside from being an able producer of interactive maps, he’s also an advocate for making programming an essential and commonplace skill in the newsroom.

Andersen started running online databases and mash-ups for a local newspaper in Norway creating - amongst others - interactive stories about snails reeking havoc across the regions gardens.

The principles may be the same but the subject matter has changed somewhat now he’s at NRK, where his most recent creation was a database mapping Norwegian politicians; how they vote, which boards they sit on and with whom.

“The idea is to make information about these networks more easily available,” Espen Andersen told Journalism.co.uk.

He has been brought in to help Brennpunkt, the Norwegian equivalent of Panorama, use online tools more effectively in both gathering and presenting information.

His Politikerdatabasen creation currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country’s 11,000 local politicians in May.

“This project is just as much a journalistic project as making a TV-programme or a documentary. It’s all about presenting information that is valuable to the audience,” said Andersen.

The aim of the project, he added, is to turn the database into a broader ‘power database’ by mapping political and corporate networks across Norway.

This mapping project followed the creation for another recent Brennpunkt documentary of a network map of the country’s oil industry.

“I think it is absolutely key to bring programmers into the newsrooms so they can get involved in journalistic projects at an early stage.

“Programmers can create solutions to process large quantities of information, e.g. from public sources, and present it in an engaging and orderly manner,” Andersen said.

Before joining Brennpunkt, Andersen created several high-profile online databases and mash-ups for local newspaper Budstikka.

“I learned quite a bit about what kind of stories engage people when I worked at Budstikka: it is often issues that are very close to them. For instance, we made an online map where people could fill in their parking fines,” he said.

“Using databases we were able to summarise the fines to find which parking lots people were most annoyed with. It was a great success.”

Other projects that were big hits with the local community was an interactive map detailing which parts of the region were most troubled by snails killing off plants - a huge problem for passionate garden owners in the area (see main image), and an event map on Google maps.

The latter showed all events taking place in the area the newspaper served, and even garnered international attention.

“It’s typical of working for a local newspaper that you think you are working on a really big story on political budgets and trends, and you find people do not click on the story at all,” Andersen (above) said.

Information for the databases and maps, he added, are usually taken from publicly available listings, databases and other sources such as the tax lists, Company’s House, polling companies.

“However, it is a problem, especially for local newspapers, that public institutions often charge big fees for this information which has been gathered on behalf of the public, using the taxpayers money,” he said.

These few problems aside, he’s hopeful that in a few years programmers in the newsrooms will be as natural as having picture editors.