Author Archives: Kristine Lowe

About Kristine Lowe

Kristine Lowe is a media journalist, blogger, consultant and founder of The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA). She reports on media and journalism with a particular focus on the industry in Scandinavia.

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

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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.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: David Montgomery’s toughest general – Lisbeth Knudsen, editor-in-chief of Berlingske Media

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Once so controversial as the boss of The Mirror, over the last few years David Montgomery has reinvented himself as a European media mogul.

As head of the pan-European media company Mecom, Montgomery has emerged as an internet evangelist and one of the most optimistic advocates of a multimedia future.

This is good news for Lisbeth Knudsen, CEO and editor-in-chief of Mecom’s worst performing subsidiary.

Denmark’s Berlingske Media is the biggest publisher of daily newspapers in one of Europe’s toughest newspaper markets. Revenues of paid for dailies in Denmark have been ravaged by a costly two-year-long freesheet war.

When Montgomery bought the Danish company in 2006, it had a paltry 3.5 per cent profit margin – miles away from the 15 – 20 per cent Montgomery was promising his investors.

But it’s all grist to the mill for Knudsen, who rumour has it secured her job last spring by submitting the longest list of potential cost cuts.

Montgomery’s toughest general has been charged with justifying his professed faith in the profits to be made from the new media world.

“It is my task to deliver what I have promised, but also to tell Berlingske’s journalists that we have exciting times ahead of us. It is necessary for our survival that we start using new work processes, develop our journalism and launch new digital products. Old traditions are no longer enough,” Knudsen told Journalism.co.uk

Her first act as head of Berlingske was to publicly denounce Mecom’s profit demands as unrealistic.

Simultaneously, she made it crystal clear that the financial situation required radical changes, skilfully lowering the expectations of both her boss and the unions.

Integrate everything
Central to those changes is integration. Not only converging media platforms, but also altering most of the company’s titles into ‘verticals’ that deliver copy across platforms and titles be they broadsheet, tabloid or regional newspapers.

Berlingske may have created one of the most integrated media operations in Europe, but it has also caused great concern among the company’s journalists about work flow, work culture and how it may erode the different media brands.

“Everyone has to be able to work and plan to all media platforms. Journalists get more resources to cover events in this way. Instead of sending three journalists from three different platforms or titles, we will now have one journalist cover the results of a football match, one live blogging it, and one writing the portrait of the game’s top scorer,” said Knudsen.

To ensure editorial standards, she added, each title will have a brand manager to makes sure it runs only content that is appropriate and in line with its specific values.

Discontent
These assurances have not been enough, however, to assure the domestic journalists union. It has voiced continuous concern about merging titles, job cuts and the new ‘integrated’ work environment where journalists are confined to hot desks to create a paperless environment.

Knudsen says that new technology is necessary. Adding that the increase in the number of tools at the disposal of her reporters has also created many exciting new opportunities for journalists.

“This integration is necessary to survive. Journalists today have to accept that they have to fight for every pair of eyeballs. I accepted this job because I believe, both as a journalist and as CEO, we can create something great in this company,” she said.

Not here to please
As for her proprietor, she said: “It is my impression that you can have a discussion. If I am to be in charge of this, I have to believe in it. I have made it very clear that I’m not here to please. I have a very open and direct dialogue with the management about our goals and progress. During my thirty-something years in the newspaper industry I’ve encountered a lot of unprofessional owners. Mecom is a very professional owner, the company imposes certain demands to our revenues, but that is the way it has to be.”

David Montgomery may have got himself a straight shooter, but what impression is she likely to have made on her newsroom staff? It seems she is a journalististic champion who is both admired and feared.

“If anyone can stand up to Montgomery it is she. She is completely ruthless and resembles Montgomery in many ways. I cannot think of anyone in Danish media who dares to pick a fight with her,” said a journalist who has worked with Knudsen but did not wish to be named.

“But her journalistic integrity is above reproach. She is a journalistic champion.”

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Here come the Web 2.0 docusoaps

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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

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

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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.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: “Computer programming is journalism”

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

image of snails website

“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. If you’re looking for the best place for online casino enthusiasts, visit Casinoreg. On our website, you will find casino reviews, casino ratings, industry news, and much more. Visit our site at https://casinoreg.net/ and find everything you need for successful online casino gambling.

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

image of Espen Andersen

“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. And here you can find all the information about the most popular collection of friv games.

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.

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

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

image of vg newspaper’s online project into domestic murders

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.”

image of vg newspaper

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.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: lessons in UGC, follow the crowd

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine 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.

image of reader submitted photo from ski race

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

image of world cup ski racing

“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.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Print and online integration ‘not the key to success’

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Image of Kristine Lowe Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks why not integrating print and online may be the way forward.

Integration is not the recipe to become a nation’s newspaper of choice, says the editor-in-chief of Norway’s leading news site.

“It is very demanding to take the poll position both in print and online as VG has done in Norway. It demands a very strong focus on both platforms,” Torry Pedersen, the editor-in-chief of Schibsted-owned VG online, Norway’s most profitable and most read news site, told journalism.co.uk.

“Print and online are different disciplines and will only become more different. Until now, we have been so fortunate as to be able to develop on our own and build our own culture,” added Pedersen.

VG.no is organised in a different company than its printed sister publication, VG (short for Verdens Gang).

This separation has transfered into dramatic success because each company has a core business with specific aims, rather than often counter productive aims of a newspaper company producing online and print under one system.

In 2006, VG.no had a profit margin of 42.1 per cent compared to the 12.6 per cent of VG’s print edition. In week 11 2008, the news site had 3m users (according to TNS Gallup).

“Our success is to a large extent built on the fact that VG online has had its own floor and been separate from the rest of the newspaper. This is changing now that VG online has become so big we need more space, but I’m adamant that VG online will be a separate news operation,” Pedersen said.

Pedersen, who has staff keeping a constant eye on worldwide online innovation, told Journalism.co.uk that he had yet to see an example of online and print integration being fully successful.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Should public broadcaster seek competitive advantage online by offering users content for free?

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. Today Online Journalism Scandinavia asks if public broadcasters should be more restrained in the content they offer for free online.

The head of the online division of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) has admitted that it intends to use its public mandate of supplying content for free as a competitive advantage on the web through increasing activity with file-sharing and social networks.

“I believe all public broadcasters more and more think along the lines that it is a competitive advantage that they can deliver content without charging it for it,” said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, head of the online division of NRK.

He added that the organisation is actively working to use its public mandate as a competitive advantage to strengthen its position online.

Not only are they working to make NRK’s content more easily available to download and share on social sites, such as YouTube and Facebook, but are also experimenting with file-sharing services such as BitTorrent and Joost.

NRK recently made its first programme series available to download in Bit Torrent, they liked it so much, they are thinking of doing more. (You can read about their experiences so far here.)

The broadcaster has also been working to get its own channel up and running on Joost, a project that has been delayed somewhat by the challenge of obtaining permissions from all the copyright holders involved.

In addition, it has recently made some of its footage available to use under a creative commons license on Flickr. Something Germany’s public broadcaster has also dabbled with.

So is this the way forward? A good way to give value back to all its license fee payers, or just a way of completely skewing the competition in the broadcasting market?

What if the BBC, in a time of intensified competition, started extending its own free delivery of content across Facebook and bit-torrent sites? It’s probably only a matter of time, but is it an unfair advantage over commercial broadcasters, news and otherwise?

Is it a way of better fulfilling its public mandate, or just an outright example of the rampant commercialism of public broadcasters using public funding as an advantage against others that find it more difficult to distribute content for free?