Journalist scoops press and police with simple Google search

Danish police had been searching for Rumenian murder suspect Marian Clita for a good 24 hours when Norwegian journalist Andreas Lunde Googled him, found his phone number and got him on the line.

In a scoop that almost beggars belief, ABC Nyheter’s Andreas Lunde, tracked down the man wanted for the brutal murder of Norwegian Scandinavian Airline stewardess Vera Vildmyren in Copehnhagen, a man sought by both the police and the press, with a simple Google Search.

“I found a blog post he had commented on, using his name and phone number when doing so, put the Rumenian land code in front of the number and called,” Lunde told Danish TV2 News.

Clita picked up the phone, confirmed he was indeed Marian Clita, professed to be unaware the police was searching for him, but, when asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, said he would get a taxi to the police station in ten minutes – and kept his word.

Later, ABC Nyheter called him again, and Clita said he had reported himself to the police and was waiting for them to find an interpreter. The police said Clita had told them: “I have killed a woman I Copenhagen” and thanked Lunde for tracking him down.

Lunde wasn’t actually on the Clita-case, but, as he told a former colleague, “I wasn’t on that particular case, but I’m a journalist and I’m curious, and when I get hold of his number it becomes my case.”

A video-journalist, Lunde has on many other occasions proved how willingness to experiment with new and old technology and storytelling techniques can be used to enhance journalism. In this case, two fairly dated tools, Google and a telephone, were the keys to the story.

For the record: I’m a media columnist with ABC Nyheter and as the president of The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). I have a keen interest in promoting and sharing good online practices.

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Copenhagen Post: Danish newspaper apologises for reprinting Mohammed cartoons

A Danish newspaper which reprinted the 2005 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in an act of solidarity following a murder plot against one of the cartoonists in 2008 has issued an apology to eight Muslim organisations to stave off future legal action against the paper.

Politiken was one of 11 Danish newspapers to reprint the cartoons, which were originally published by Jyllands-Posten, but has apologised for any offence caused.

The move by the paper has been criticised by other publishers, including JP editor Jorn Mikkelsen who said the apology flew in the face of freedom of speech as it formed part of a deal.

Full story at this link…

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: A blogging-journalist hero for Ada Lovelace Day

Danish IT-journalist Dorte Toft used her blog to help reveal one of the country’s biggest business scandals in modern time. It won her both acclaim and criticism.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and, answering UK software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson’s call, over 1,500 blogger worldwide have pledged to write about a woman they admire working in technology. As I believe we sorely need new journalistic heroes and new myths who better illustrate the opportunities offered by our rapidly changing media landscape, I thought I would take this opportunity to put forward one such hero.

Dorte Toft is the programmer turned journalist whose blogging helped reveal IT Factory, named “Denmark’s Best IT-company 2008″ by Danish Computerworld, as one big ponzi scheme: according to Techcrunch, sources assessed that up to 90 per cent of IT Factory’s turnover had been based on non-existent or false contracts.

Toft, a blogger at Berlingske Business and freelance IT-journalist, started blogging about the company in December 2007 – almost a year before the company was declared bankrupt. The blog helped her solicit sources, tip offs and made her blog the natural place to turn to for those both in the know, and those wishing to understand more and talk about what was happening in the company.

For her work, which was the closest any Danish media came to reveal the IT Factory scam before the company was forced to admit it all, Toft has received several awards, including the e-Jour award for outstanding online journalism, but the story could have ended very differently.

Only a few days before the company was declared bankrupt, the IT journalist was preparing to go to court to defend herself against libelling IT Factory and its CEO Stein Bagger. He had sued Berlingske, where Toft writes her blog, for allowing several anonymous and libellous comments to be posted on the blog and was calling for damages to the tune of 10K.

Fortunately for Toft, events revealed several of the assertions made in these comments to be true before she had to go to trial – but the story illustrates both the extent to which libel law can be used to silence journalists; and the problems associated with talking freely, and often anonymously, on a blog.

However, this debacle led to Berlingske banning anonymous comments on its site. Steen Rosenbak, business editor at Jyllands-posten, and Jens Christian Hansen, business editor at Berlingske business, also published an op-ed in which they warned against using blogs as a journalistic tool, to which Toft replied: “Without the blog and the emails sent directly to me because of it, I would never have been able to prove that IT Factory’s products that were cited as the reason for its impressive sales had never reached the market.”

This post also appears at Kristine Lowe’s blog.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Resolutions for 2009 – Yes, we link

Danish journalists pen link manifesto, which should be an inspiration for journalists everywhere in 2009.

The last quarter of 2008 did not only open our eyes to how flawed the fiscal economy is, in Scandinavia more and more journalists also realised how awkwardly media organisations operate in the link economy.

In Norway, the union chapel at DN.no, the news site of the country’s biggest financial daily, suggested introducing a common link policy for all the country’s news sites to make it profitable to produce good original articles rather than just to copy-paste.

In Denmark, a survey by eJour found just two links to external sites when monitoring seven Danish news sites over a period of two weeks. Blogging journalists in Denmark were also up in arms over a renewed effort by Danish newspaper publishers to stop websites like Google News from linking to individual articles rather than a newspaper’s homepage.

Against this backdrop, Kim Elmose, the blog editor of Politiken.dk, and Lars K. Jensen, a project manager at Ekstrabladet.dk, launched a link manifesto and encouraged news rooms everywhere to write their own link commandments and use their manifesto freely.

Let’s hope this can inspire more and better linking on many a news site in 2009:

First law: We link to the sources for the data we use in our journalistic products. If we have read, seen or heard important new information on an external site – for instance about companies, people or surveys – we will link to it.

Second law: We link directly and precisely to the information we use from external sites. In this way we provide proper service to our readers rather than just linking to the front page of the external site.

Third law: We are precise in our information about where a link leads to; about who has produced the information we link to and when. The readers should know where it takes them when they follow a link.

Fourth law: We recognise that an article consisting of precise links to information that represents different angles on an issue is a journalistic product.

Fifth law: We are open to inbound links to our own news sites because we want to be an integrated part of the web’s ecosystem

Sixth law: We aspire to making it easier to link directly to our articles.

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Poynter Online: An example of a newspaper doing well without a… paper

Troubled US newspapers should look to Denmark’s Avisen.dk when considering whether an internet-only edition is sustainable, writes Ernst Poulsen over at Poyntor E-Media Tidbits.

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: Mecom’s Danish arm will cut costs with open-source CMS

Mecom-owned Berlingske Media, Denmark’s biggest daily newspaper publisher, has decided to ditch its costly online publishing system for open-source software Drupal.

As Journalism.co.uk reported earlier this year, Berlingske Media already runs some of its sites on Drupal – a free content management system (CMS).

After a long period of deliberation, the Danish division of Mecom, the ailing pan-European media group headed by former Mirror-boss David Montgomery, has decided to make Drupal its online publishing system of choice.

“It is no secret that economy means a lot to us, but if the system had been unstable and not user-friendly, the price would not have been decisive,” Berlingske’s CEO Lisbeth Knudesen told eJour (in Danish).

She particularly praised Drupal for being so much more flexible than traditional publishing platforms.

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GlobalVoices: Danish newspaper publishers call for controls on Google links

Danish newspaper publishers are insisting the search engine and other sites only provide homepage links, rather than directing users to individual articles.

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paidContent:UK: Metro International making big losses online

Metro International, the freesheet publisher, said it doesn’t expect to break even in 2008: so far this year has lost a total €3.97 million (£3.08 million) from its seven websites in Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Chile, France and Spain.

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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?

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Online Journalism Scandinavia: VG.no adds blog trackbacks to articles with Twingly

Schibsted-owned VG.no has added a popular ‘trackback’ function, allowing the site to display what bloggers are saying about its articles.

Yesterday the site quietly opened its virtual doors for bloggers and started using Swedish blogsearch-engine Twingly to display links from bloggers below individual articles.

Previously the country’s second biggest tabloid Dagbladet had adopted the function for its news site, while the news sites of other influential Scandinavian newspapers, such as Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter in Sweden, and Politiken in Denmark, have been using it for some time now.

Several of these papers have seen Twingly as a way of building a bridge to the blogosphere.

“Twingly has built a solid position in the Nordic market, so it was a natural choice. We see it as a way to enrich our articles,” René Svendsen, deputy editor for VG.no, told Journalism.co.uk.

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