Tag Archives: young readers

Calling all young journos: Welcome to Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists

Journalism.co.uk and journalism blogger Dave Lee are proud to introduce a new forum for young journalists.

The Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists blogging ring (or TNTJ between you and me) is a place for young journalists from across the globe to share their experiences/anxieties/ideas/random thoughts…

To take part there are just a couple of criteria:

1) you must be under 30-years-old
2) you must blog about journalism (for more details on what this entails read Dave’s introduction)

Each month a topic/question will be put up for discussion. Interested parties can register and contribute their thoughts in a blog post, which will then be published on the TNTJ site. Feel free to post away on your own blog too.

You can log in and post your entry for about a week or so after the first post – though there’ll be no time limit on leaving comments.

We’re kicking off with the following: “The biggest challenge facing a young journalist in today’s media is…”

So far we’ve had some great responses, so why not have a read, young journos, or better still post your own.

You can follow updates to TNTJ through Journalism.co.uk’s journalismnews Twitter feed.

For more info or queries contact Dave Lee at davelee.mail@gmail.com or email laura@journalism.co.uk.

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.