Tag Archives: Norway

Kristine Lowe: Time to support David Montgomery?

At the weekend, the Sunday Times reported that Mecom CEO David Montgomery faced an investor rebellion.

Kristine Lowe, who has followed the activities of Mecom (which owns 300 newspapers) since its early days, shares her thoughts on her blog, linking into content elsewhere.

“My hunch is that it’s [the rebellion] nothing to cheer for,” she says.

“[I]f we look at the objections against his leadership brought forth after last year’s revolt, and Mecom’s continuing poor stock market performance this year, it seems to me that the man who gained a reputation as such a brutal cost-cutter during his Mirror-days is simply not a brutal enough cost-cutter for the investors in question.

She also notes that örsen, the Danish financial daily, is reporting that Mecom shareholders are disappointed that share prices have not improved more.

Full post at this link…

#WANIndia2009: Geotagging and VG.no’s News Portal

Schibsted-owned Norwegian newspaper VG.no isn’t just a newspaper – it’s also a software developer, having built a system for readers to send in stories, news tips and images by mobile. The technology behind the VG News Portal has been bought by newspaper websites internationally, including the Sun and News of the World in the UK.

Papers can also rent the system, Vidar Meisingseth, project manager at VG.no, tells Journalism.co.uk. The image below shows what an editor using the system sees as tips are submitted.

Screen of VG News Portal

But new benefits of the portal are becoming apparent: in Oslo VG has created a database of its freelance correspondents and ‘tippers’ (users who send in tips and content). By geotagging this information the editorial team at VG.no can call up a map when a story breaks showing who is within a 50km radius.

This has potential for both assigning freelancers to stories, but also to finding eyewitnesses or gathering more information from citizens on the ground, says Meisingseth.

Using geotagging presents further opportunities not yet trialled by the paper, for example, mapping related stories such as a crime to see where and how frequently it is happening in a certain area.

VG.no already has information on its regular ‘tippers’ and this too could provide editorial leads, if for example a reader was sending in the same complaint about an unresolved issue in their area month-on-month.

In the Oslo system images sent in are also being geotagged – a useful step in the factchecking process with the potential to create image maps around larger, breaking news events.

All coverage of #WANIndia2009 from Journalism.co.uk can be found at this link.

#followjourn: @kristinelowe/media journalist

#FollowJourn: Kristine Lowe

Who? Blogger and journalist currently based in Norway covering the media industry – for the media industry

What? She writes for numerous titles in Scandinavia and the UK/US, and founded The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA)

Where? @kristinelowe

Contact? Take a look at her blog or email kristine_lowe [at] yahoo.co.uk.

Just as we like to supply you with fresh and innovative tips every day, we’re recommending journalists to follow online too. They might be from any sector of the industry: please send suggestions (you can nominate yourself) to judith or laura at journalism.co.uk; or to @journalismnews.

Media Release: Schibsted titles to livestream Norwegian football matches

Interesting deal between Level 3 Communications and Scandinavian publisher Schibsted, which will bring live streaming of Norwegian Football League games to the group’s newspaper websites.

Users will be able to watch matches on a pay-per-game basis.

“A truly interactive service merging video, text and community functionality,” said Dag Wigum, CIO, at Schibsted ASA, in the release.

Full release at this link…

Alan Rusbridger (@arusbridger) on why Twitter matters

Twitter got a big mention in Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s ‘Journalism Matters’ speech last night. Repeating his ‘future of newspaper’ Twitter recommendations made in Berlin in April (@amonck, @niemanlab, @jeffjarvis and @cshirky) he praised the way it could be used as a personalised filter for information consumption.

He used Guardian technology writer Jemima Kiss as one example of why to use it – she’s probably in labour, and twittering it, ‘as we speak’, he joked. Journalism.co.uk didn’t put its hand up to say ‘err, no – she’s already had all 10lb 6oz of it’ (we learned via Twitter, obviously).

He also mentioned @GuardianTech with its impressive 900,000+ followers, and showed how journalist Paul Lewis (@http://twitter.com/paul__lewis) had used his account to report from the G20 protests.

Before Rusbridger was reborn as @arusbridger he thought it was all a bit, well, ‘silly’, but now he’s well and truly converted. In fact he thinks all Guardian journalists should use it: “I”m trying to get everyone to twitter”. He told this to a room of newspaper journalists in Norway and they asked whether he, as editor-in-chief, would have to moderate all those tweets?…

John Mair’s report on last night’s Media Standards Trust event here, and tweets from @journalism_live, and others captured by the #journmatters tag, below.

Organ Grinder: Guardian’s Eurovision liveblog – Scandinavia reacts

Organ Grinder reports on how the Guardian’s tongue-in-cheek liveblogging of Saturday’s Eurovision contest was reported by Scandinavian media.

The perils of liveblogging? Norwegian, Danish and Swedish titles took some of the blog’s teasing comments as the Guardian’s official line, with their humour lost in translation (but leading to some highly amusing headlines…)

Full post at this link…

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.

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Database journalism making Norwegian politicians more accountable

A new database mapping the networks and voting patterns of Norway’s politicians may become an invaluable journalistic tool when the country gears up for a parliamentary election next year.

During the 2009 election Norwegian hacks will be able to tap into a recently developed politicians’ database that maps how the country’s politicos vote, which boards they sit on, and with whom.

In an interview with Journalism.co.uk in April, Espen Andersen, the database’s creator, described how he was adding to the information held on country’s members of Parliament with data about 11,000 local politicians.

This work has now been completed, and the aim of the project is to turn the database into a broader ‘power database’ by mapping political and corporate networks across Norway.

The creation was so popular that it completely crashed the servers of Brennpunkt, the Norwegian equivalent of Panorama, when it was launched.

Calls were immediately made for expansion, and for it to include similar information about journalists, in order to open up the debate on who watches the watchers.