Tag Archives: Europe

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging

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Image of Kristine LoweKristine Lowe’s (left) Online Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at the demand for celebrity bloggers in Sweden.

Swedish lifestyle sites are using celebrity bloggers to drive traffic and to help lure attractive advertisers to their sites.

Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman (below) recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, in search of a pay per click deal.

Schulman is big news in the Swedish blogosphere. She is married to one of the nation’s most successful bloggers (neither known for mincing their words, hence the name of her blog), her husband is also part of a family that is old, aristocratic and influential in its own right.

image of Katrin Schulman

She told the Swedish media: “I only work on commission. Four pence per unique visitor per month,” and promised to deliver nothing short of 120,000 visitors to any potential site wanting to host her blog.

It’s a far cry from the digital era sweatshop described by The New York Times.

She was eventually hired by Sthlmsfinest.com, a website and online community focused on celebrities and a direct competitor of Stureplan, which is a general lifestyle magazine and site born out of Stockholm’s club scene.

“We have seen a 15,000 increase in visitors just in the couple of days Katrin has been blogging here. She has a lot of readers,” Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of Sthlmsfinest, told Journalism.co.uk.

All the bloggers the site hired by Sthlmsfinest.com to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends have to bring in their own audiences, Erwik added.

He also said that he hoped that in just two weeks hiring Schulman would have brought a substantially traffic increase from 70,000 users to around 100,00 readers to the site.

Le Monde staff to stage second strike

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Staff at French daily newspaper Le Monde are taking further industrial action over plans to cut 129 jobs including 90 of the title’s journalists, the AFP reports.

Today’s strike – voted for yesterday – is the second in a week after action was taken on Monday.

The paper’s management says the planned cuts, which include sale of several magazines also published by the group, will ‘save the publication’.

Nielsen Online makes host of UK and EMEA appointments

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Stephen Brooks has been appointed as the UK managing director of web analytics firm Nielsen Online. Brooks takes up his new post after working for EMAP, where he was digital director for magazines.

Before EMAP he was publisher of mad.co.uk for seven years, having helped launch the Centaur title in 1999.

Joining Brooks is David Webb as UK client director media research and Matthew Dodd as vice president of research and analytics for EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Webb was formerly director of digital research worldwide for CNN International, while Dodd leaves the Telegraph Media Group, where he was director of customer insight.

Moving roles within the company, Brad Little has also been named director of industry solutions for the UK team.

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?

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

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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. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences. Continue reading →

Welt.de posts record traffic for February

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WELT Online – the website of German Newspaper Die Welt – attracted record traffic figures last month, according to a press release from parent company Axel Springer AG.

The site recorded 137 million page views in February, a rise of around 10 per cent from 124 million in January, and 19 million unique users compared to 16 million in January.

The new figures put the site ahead of rival news sites Focus, which recorded 16 million unique users over the same period, and n-de.tv – 15 million unique users, the release said.

DNA 2008: from outsourcing to in-house, De Persgroep’s ad strategy

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While other media groups consider outsourcing their ad production, at today’s Digital News Affairs (DNA) conference Christian Van Thillo, CEO of Belgium’s De Persgroup, explained his group’s reverse strategy.

Having started by outsourcing all advertising, Persgroup has recently brought its ad production in-house.

Its Fred advertising production service is similar to that recently launched by the Telegraph in the UK for online advertisers and targets big brands offering the opportunity to create multi-platform, group wide campaigns.

According to Van Thillo, news providers online face ‘more of an economic challenge than a content challenge’.

Keeping advertising production under group control could help broach this challenge, while helping alleviate fears for jobs raised by outsourcing models.

In this video clip, Van Thillo also talks about how forming early partnerships with other publishers helped to protect and grow their revenues from recruitment advertising (originally 20 per cent of De Persgroep’s total income).

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z1uwplpFK0]

Innovations in Journalism – Imooty.eu

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Image of imooty website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?

Hello. I’m Kristoffer Lassen. I’m the co-founder of Imooty.

Imooty is an interactive compendium of news stories from across Europe. It provides direct access to the latest breaking media coverage from the most important newspapers and media organizations based in the European Union, Switzerland and Norway.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?

Imooty makes it possible for users to compare and contrast vast amounts of information.

By clicking the European map, readers may browse through a particular country’s major and minor papers and blogs in English and local languages.

One can easily search for a particular term across all European papers or simply navigate by the common news topics such as politics, science, or business.

MyImooty allows users to create their own media universe. By collecting and saving the most frequently accessed news topics, you may collect your favourite sources on a single customized page. Each time you return to your page, the news is updated and sorted by subject, search terms and titles.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?

The technical and conceptual goal of Imooty is not only to provide access to the latest breaking news, but also to enable a convenient way to review news archives.

With its integrated search engine, users may find specific content located in several different databases and retrieve them through a single business transaction. We’re also in the process of adding Podcast and IPTV modules.

4) Why are you doing this?

I’m Norwegian and co-founder Blaise Bourgeois is French but we are both expats living in Germany.

We are both interested in commentary and analysis of current events; however, keeping up to date on both the media landscape here in Berlin, as well as in our respective home countries was unmanageable.

So we set out to create a platform that could solve this problem. We believe that as the European Union continues its development, more people will migrate and follow news and current events in different languages from nearby countries.

5) What does it cost to use it?

Access to the latest news is free and we simply redirect traffic to the newspapers. Reklama: Bene pigiausios auto dalys internetu svetainėje UAB ŠIAULIŲ AUTODOTA As mentioned, also archived news will be searchable on the platform and such content will be displayed in the same format as the latest news (headline with a teaser text below it). Access to this information is a premium feature.

6) How will you make it pay?

Our business model is based on a combination of sales commission and advertising revenue.

Image of imooty website also

France: Les Echos goes mobile and new cit-j site launches

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Les Echos has launched a mobile site – http://www.m.lesechos.fr – the Editors’ Weblog reports.

The site will feature a mobile version of the daily and can be accessed by non-subscribers to Les Echos, though some content may be restricted to subscribers only.

Elsewhere, also reported by the Editors’ Weblog, Jérôme Bouvier, president of the Journalism and Citizenship Association, has launced a site to match up professional journalists with citizen reporters.

On the Vu des quartiers [‘seen from the neighbourhood’] site, the citizen journalists will decide on issues to report on and act as writers overseen by the professionals. The aim is to build stronger links with areas, which may feel out-of-touch with the media.

According to the report, which was originally in Le Monde, around 60 pros have already signed up to the project, which will run until the second round of the country’s forthcoming municipal elections on March 16.

Spinvox launches voice to social network application

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Spinvox is launching in Europe an add-on to its voice-to-text technology that will allow voice-driven social networking from any mobile phone.

The new gizmo will allow users to file post to Facebook, Jaiku and Twitter, according to a post on the relaunched Spinvox website:

“Social Networks through SpinVox is launched today as a key element of the new, state-of-the-art SpinVox website. People can create an account on www.spinvox.com, where they can manage one, two or all three of their networking sites from one, personalised page. In addition, accounts can be set up so that one voice-powered contribution can be posted automatically to all three networking sites. SpinVox expects to extend this capability to other well-known social networking and micro-blogging sites in the coming months.”