Tag Archives: Aftonbladet

WikiLeaks director to write column for Swedish tabloid

WikiLeaks director Julian Assange will start writing a monthly column for a Swedish tabloid newspaper, according to a report by Daily Tech.

Based on what claims to be a translated interview from the publication – Aftonbladet – this weekend by Mathaba.net, Assange is said to confirm he will be writing the column to raise “press issues” and that there “might be some scoops”.

But Daily Tech added that there may also be other reasons that the whistleblower would want to become a columnist for the paper.

There’s a couple of potential reasons why Assange might pick to write for Aftonbladet other than merely a love for tabloid journalism. WikiLeaks operates a number of servers in Sweden and is currently seeking a license to get full journalistic protections.  An official column in Aftonbladet could help its case.

Also, WikiLeaks is reportedly very cash strapped and Assange’s payments could offset his costly lifestyle, which features a great deal of travel.

See their full report here…

csmonitor.com: Israeli officials seek Swedish government condemnation of organ theft story

Christian Science Monitor reports on the ‘blood libel’ charge made by Israeli politicians and journalists against a Swedish daily newspaper, Aftonbladet.

“In the view from Jerusalem, the answer to the controversy is simple: the Swedish government should condemn Aftonbladet, the tabloid which last week printed an article suggesting that Israel snatched the organs of Palestinians who died in their custody.

“In the view from Stockholm, the answer is equally simple: Israel should accept that in a democracy, newspapers are free to print what they wish, and that it isn’t the place of governments to interfere.”

Full post at this link…

The Local: Free Dawit Isaak, says Swedish newspapers

Sweden’s four largest titles – Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen – have teamed up for a campaign calling for the release of Swedish journalist Dawit Isaak, who has been jailed in Eritrea for the last 2,742 days.

Full story at this link…

WAN 2008: Web TV Q&A with Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief Aftonbladet.se

Kalle Jungkvist chaired the digital round table of the World Newspaper Congress looking at growing multimedia audience and revenues. Journalism.co.uk talked to him after the session about the success of his newspapers web TV operation.

In your opening you said that Aftonbladet was a video rich site and that you are a rival to Swedish TV broadcasters, could you explain how?
In a single week we have about one million visitors just to the video service. Even that is bigger than the whole of the audience to the biggest commercial TV site TV4. We are the biggest on web TV.

Swedish public service television focuses on longer programmes for web TV but they don’t have the same reach.

Is yours just news programming?
We work with feeds from AP and Reuters, the same feed really that TV companies have for their news programmes. We use part of that, clip it down and re-edit it and so on.

The other part is that we have a lot of user videos, so when there is a big explosion or a bank is robbed, for example, it takes just two minutes to get videos from the users.

So we do a lot of campaigning for the readers to send those to us and not to the TV stations.

The third part is that we have team of our own, both programming and editing, and also reporters going out on big stories.

And they put packages together?
We don’t make news programmes, we use news clips. From 30 seconds to three minutes. We use small format programmes for the web, five minutes or so, that are based on fashion with our fashion reporter for example and they are starting to get very high numbers.

For the European Football Championships we have also started an 18 minute programme with our football experts.

Just a year ago it was just 30 seconds to a minute clips that were popular, now there is a whole menu that is increasing fast.

What do you put that success down to?
We stared in 1997 and have had a small video web team all the way through. But we really launched web video services in a big way two years ago.

One very important point is that TV company websites just take clips from their ordinary news service… we noticed that, for a video clip that we produce together with written text, when you integrate it into a news story the numbers go up.

We try to have moving pictures with big news stories as fast as possible and we are much faster than the TV guys.

As the clips get longer has that changed when viewers watch them?
In the afternoon people look at shorter clips then in the evening we have a prime time at eight. The same as TV. People are looking at more and watching longer formats here, using us in a different way. They are at home, they are more relaxed and we are really taking people from the traditional broadcast TV to us.

We are not stealing a big audience yet but we haven’t had this peak at eight o’clock before… a lot of young people don’t look at linear TV anymore.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Metro Sweden’s deal with Schibsted part of its ‘Freesheets 2.0′ strategy

Norwegian media giant Schibsted this morning announced that it’s paying £30m to take a 35 per cent stake in the Swedish edition of Metro International’s free newspaper.

In what is a key freesheet market the former rivals have forged a partnership to collaborate on advertising sales with the new company offering advertisers the chance to reach 4.2 million readers across the Metro and Schibsted paid-for dailies Aftonbladet and Dagbladet.

In February, Metro International CEO, Per Mikael Jensen, discussed his company’s strategic goals with Journalism.co.uk saying that consolidation and online innovation would be key for the development of his newspapers, in what he called the ‘freesheet 2.0 phase.’

“We are entering a freesheet 2.0 phase where we are consolidating our core business and looking at more ways to attract readers,” said Jensen, who succeeded Pelle Törnberg as head of Metro in 2007.

In Sweden, this consolidation will mean Schibsted will stop publication of its free paper Punkt SE with immediate effect so that the new joint venture can focus print advertising around a single free title.

The deal has similarities with the one Metro struck at the end of 2007, when it sold 60 per cent of its Czech operation to its competitor Mafra.

The freesheet giant is currently undergoing a strategic review, and when Journalism.co.uk spoke to him, Jensen said we could expect more deals of this nature.

Today, Jensen refused to rule out further consolidations when questioned by Danish media and said he expected dramatic changes in the Danish newspaper market in the coming months (but refused to go into details).

“We do not just sit there and wait for the strategic review to be completed, but implement strategy from day to day. Strategy is something we evaluate each month. Those who believe the strategic review we now are in the middle of will become some sort of bible, will be disappointed,” said Jensen in the interview with Journalism.co.uk.

In addition, Metro is looking to attract more readers online. It’s launching new versions of its websites in all its markets – it recently launched online for the first time in France – and will consolidate some of its editorial activities by creating an internal news agency in London which will serve all its editions.

Jensen is behind Metro’s new developments and alliances but he remains as pessimistic as ever about the future of paid-for printed newspapers.

“I would be very surprised if more than 25 per cent of today’s paid-for newspapers exist in ten years. Of the newspapers that will survive, many of them will be published online only, or make its paper edition free,” Jensen said.

The two newspaper giants may have forged a partnership in Sweden but they remain embroiled in a head-to-head competition over their market leading freesheets in France and Spain.

However, Metro International still has a lot of work to do to convince investors that its business model – the company is still loss-making even though it narrowed its first quarter net loss to £5.1 m – has a profitable future.

Aftonbladet rolls out social network for readers

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has soft launched a new community for users called Snack, Media Culpa reports.

It is hoped the site, which lets users share comments, images and videos, will be populated by readers acting under their own names rather than anonymous pseudonyms.

According to Media Culpa, the newspaper will soon open up commenting facilities across its online articles to encourage even more user interaction with the site.

Aftonbladet to offer readers social network style profiles

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is to launch a ‘Facebook-like’ community for its online readers, the Media Culpa blog reports.

According to the site, readers will be given user profile pages on which they can leave comments about articles – a feature not currently available on the main site

It is hoped that the service, which has been delayed by security issues, will be launched in two months.

Facebook: Online newspaper’s biggest enemy

Interesting post over at Media Culpa asking if Swedish daily Aftonbladet’s biggest threat is now Facebook rather than Expressen, its next nearest newspaper rival online.

(I have had to rely on Media Cupla as the source, rather than the original post Mindpark, as I don’t speak Swedish – so apologies for linking to a post about a post)

Henrik Torstenssons draws out a second point to note. Henrik points to another story (again in Swedish – same problem, so I can’t confirm this is the case, although have faith in Henrik) in which Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, said his paper ran a focus group with people in their twenties, who told him the choice for young Swedes was either Aftonbladet or Facebook for their idle surfing time.

How long before Facebook is getting newspaper execs in the UK worried?