Bild-Zeitung recycles a photo of Norwegian athlete Kari Traa from 2001. Editors shout in joy: Great news! Slut wins medal! What a headline! Another easy match for the critics over at Bildblog, of course.
Archive for February, 2006
How to define non-news
Friday, February 17th, 2006Economist subscriber no. 1
Friday, February 17th, 2006According to my Bloglines account I have the honour of being subscriber no. 1 to The Economist’s print edition RSS feed. The lonely subscriber’s wish is that the magazine will feed me _all_ stories next week. This time I received 39, and a check on the website reveals that they omitted several stories.
Schibsted’s feedback loop
Friday, February 17th, 2006Schibsted underway with a blueprint of their Swedish business site N24.se. VG and Aftenposten will launch N24.no in April. So they use two of the best known brand names to push a new brand with a completely generic, profile-less name? It seems to work in Sweden so far, but is it wise in the long run?
Embarrassing EU
Thursday, February 16th, 2006What is the EU up to in the cartoon controversy? An EU media code of conduct? Javier Solana travelling the Middle East telling everyone that the Union will do whatever it can to avoid something similar happening again? It’s an embarrassing mess. And the EU spin doctor and her blog? Quiet.
At least the parliament shows some life signs.
Metacaricature
Thursday, February 16th, 2006
Steve Kelley of The New Orleans Times-Picayune neatly sums up the fate of today’s cartoonists. And here’s how the unlucky Klaus Stuttmann sees it:
Man schaut viel genauer hin, ob irgend jemand den Sinn einer Zeichnung falsch auffassen könnte. Da bleibt dann weniger Raum für Subtiles, was wiederum den Nachteil hat, dass die Karikatur an Intelligenz verlieren könnte. (“You check more carefully if someone might misinterpret the point of a drawing. That leaves less room for the subtle, and that has the further disadvantage that the caricature could lose its edge” – my transl.)
(Cartoon reproduced by kind permission of Steve Kelley).
Now Stuttmann, who’s next?
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006In today’s Tagesspiegel, an open letter from German cartoonists in support of their colleague Klaus Stuttmann. Stuttmann has had to go into hiding after receiving death threats because of a cartoon his Berlin newspaper published on February 10 (click “Bilderstrecke” to see it). As the paper has tried to explain, the subject is the German debate about security under the upcoming football World Cup. Iranians have used it as a pretext to threaten Stuttmann, demand an apology (very original) and attack the German embassy in Teheran.
A commentary in today’s Tagesspiegel calls what’s happening now an extension of the taboo zone. There’s every reason to fear that. The imbalance between a very real death threat and a mere cartoon makes this an unfair struggle. Who can say that there aren’t small internal censors growing in the heads of writers and cartoonists everywhere now?
In days like these it’s tempting to quote John Stuart Mill. Every day:
But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (from On Liberty).
Regulars and irregulars
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006Paul Reynolds of the BBC calls fact-checking and critical bloggers an army of irregulars. A precise description. I’m not so surprised seeing this coming from the BBC, as I think there are many of us who can learn a lot from that organisation. The comment from Richard Sambrook couldn’t have come from any editor:
The BBC should proactively engage with bloggers. This is a new issue for us. Some departments look at blogs, though haphazardly. But it pays dividends. The BBC is a huge impersonal organisation. It needs to come out from under its rock.
Blogging – a rat race
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006It’s definitely a jungle out there. Clive Thompson’s account of the haves and have-nots of blogging makes that very clear: To become an A-list blogger you have to sit round the clock in front of computer and TV screens, but maybe it’s too late anyway, because the first movers are so very far ahead of you. And if you make it, the work has only started. If you relax, the hungry hordes will overtake you and merciless readers leave you (no wonder this is a US-dominated market, European blogs would die during our long vacations!).
Thompson focuses on bloggers with a commercial ambition, which sort of limits the scope. Most C- or D-list bloggers are happy amateurs, surely? Anyway, Thompson recognizes three business models for blogging:
- The accidental tourist: “A lone writer who starts a blog as a mere hobby but then wakes up one day to realize his audience is now as big as a small city newspaper.” Example: Talking Points Memo.
- The record-label approach: “Crank out dozens and dozens of sites and hope that one or two will become hits.” Example: Weblogs Inc.
- The boutique approach: “A publisher who crafts individual blogs the way Condé Nast crafts magazines – each one carefully aimed at some ineffable, deluxe readership.” Example: Nick Denton.
Thompson puts Shirky’s power law classic to good use in explaining the inequalities of the commercial blogging scene. But how is the relationship between non-commercial and business-oriented bloggers going to develop? The blog entrepreneur Elizabeth Spiers makes an interesting prediction: Full-time staff is the future of the “professional blogosphere”:
It’lll be more like the mainstream media, really… Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest – and that all boils down to who has the best content. The blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have credibility.
The future – a ruthless meritocracy.
UPDATE: Dave Sifry with new analysis in the Technorati weblog: He coins the term “The Magic Middle” for all those blogs that are between the A-list chartbusters and all the rest at the end of the very long tail. He includes a lot of blogs in the middle by defining that as blogs with from 20-1000 other people linking to them. About 155.000 blogs come in this category.
Journalist, know your business
Monday, February 13th, 2006Journalists need to understand how their business is changing because of the new relationship between journalist and audience, argues Amos Gelb in an excellent article in Online Journalist Review. The audience is now in control, a consequence of fragmentation, new media outlets and increased competition.
Simply put, for the last century, journalists have had it too good. Journalism was an oligopoly where the choice of news providers was limited so audiences had a choice to either get their news from one of the established news outlets or not get news at all. It was a relationship where virtually all the power belonged to the journalists, allowing them to shape mainstream journalism with only passing regard to audience preferences.
Gelb writes about the US, but it’s easy enough to apply this on Europe. His recipe, derived from studies of the Washington Monthly, washingtonpost.com and Discovery Channel, is that journalists have to understand their product, know their audience and use unconvential marketing and competition strategies.
When the University of Bergen launched their new journalism course last fall, professor Martin Eide suggested ten preliminary answers to the question “what kind of journalists will we need in the future?” Answer number five states that there’s an “acute need for journalists who understand the structure they’re a part of, who understand the political economy of modern media”.
As Gelb says, “there is an alternative approach, one in which good journalism and good business are not incompatible.” The approach we’re all looking for, right?
The endurance of the web and the power of paper
Saturday, February 11th, 2006Is web publishing an unconscious act? A stupid question, but still: In the cartoons controversy, online publishing somehow didn’t seem to “matter”. The Norwegian foreign minister kept repeating over and over that no leading Norwegian news organization had published the cartoons, only a small weekly newspaper. But Dagbladet’s online edition had. Dagbladet is Norway’s second largest newspaper measured in number of readers, and the website will soon have just as many readers as the printed paper (669.000 online readers by the last count). Hence, web publishing is, if not unconscious, still seen as a less important act than printing. If it weren’t like that, why should people care about yet another paper reprinting the cartoons when a simple web search will produce an abundance of cartoon copies? (here a couple of blog collections).
This must be a transitional phenomenon. The web ensures that the cartoons will be instantly available – forever. That’s a very long tail. Without digital media, it’s hard to see that the issue would have become a global one at all (then again, the web and 21st century globalization are inseparable). The endurance of the web makes it much harder to make an issue go away completely – stay in obscurity, yes, disappear, no. Of course there are plenty of conscious acts that must be performed to make something into a big story with real implications – in the cartoons case such acts as the Danish imams touring the Middle East to lobby for action against Jyllands-Posten and Danish authorities.
Not all foreign ministers see web publishing the same way. In Sweden a website that published the cartoons was closed by the ISP after the foreign ministry and the security police contacted the company. And the Wikipedia entry is currently “temporarily disabled” from editing by new or anonymous users after vandals had tried to alter it. No unconscious acts there.
