Media Culpa

Swedish film maker Lukas Moodysson has an article in the New York Times. He often comes across as a complete goofball, this article is no exception. But as always with Moodysson, when he finally gets down to the nitty-gritty, he always has a point.

His latest controversial film “A hole in my heart” has been labelled revolting. It may very well be. Moodysson comments about these reactions:

“But I do think it’s fascinating that people think it’s more offensive if a human being throws up than if someone is shot in the head with a pistol.”

The initial media interest in blogs during the fall has cooled off. In spite of coinciding with the run-up to the US election, the number of articles in Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish media decreased in October. Question is if this is a temporary dent in the curve (I think so).

A logical media life cycle for a phenomenon like blogs would include at least four steps.

1. Underground – not on the radar screen of traditional media.

2. Novelty – blogs in themselves are considered news. News stories would include descriptions of blogs, “how to”-articles, pros and cons etc.

3. Mainstream – people know what it is. News stories would include successful cases and descriptions, what are blogs good for, further developments etc.

4. Commodity – blogs are taken for granted and becomes part of the “normal” flow of news.

This life cycle is different for different kinds of media. For example, IT trade press has been writing about blogs for a long time, but dailies and business press have written substantially less. Considering that most people in Sweden still haven’t heard about blogs, I am convinced that blogs are still in the novelty stage of the news life cycle.

What media are covering blogs (# of articles so far in 2004)?

Sweden:

1. IDG (37)

2. Computer Sweden (32)

3. Svenska Dagbladet (16)

Norway:

1. IT-Avisen (51)

2. Dagbladet (20)

3. Dagens Næringsliv (print edition) / Propaganda / TV2 Nettavisen (10)

Finland:

1. Digitoday Finland (21)

2. ITviikko (13)

3. Tietoviikko Online (9)

Denmark:

1. Berlingske Tidende (9)

2. Politiken (8)

3. Computerworld Online (7)

Swedish newspaper front pages are for sale. Two days in a row, the two competing free dailies in Stockholm have sold their cover pages to advertisers, or actually it is called a “wrap”, an extra page before the front page, but designed to look a lot like the actual front page.

Yesterday, there was an ad on the covers of Metro in Sweden, Finland and Denmark for the launch of the game Halo 2.

Today, H&M; did the same with the cover of Stockholm City to promote its launch of the Karl Lagerfeldt collection in selected shops. Clearly advertisers are pushing the envelope in terms of how far into the editorial sections that you can go.

The fact that Observer now monitors blogs is a sign of the growing importance of this new medium. The fact that a blog savvy person doesn’t really need to buy that service, illustrates the tools available that enable us to be our own monitoring company.

I have created a group at Blogdigger.com called “Bloggtoppen” for nine of the ten blogs that Observer listed yesterday to be of special importance (Dick Erixon doesn’t have a web feed, so you would have to visit his site yourself, which in turn may give further arguments for his departure from the list). That means that you would only need to paste this URL into any news aggregator like Bloglines.com and then subscribe to this feed.

http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=504

Or you could simply visit the webpage of Blogtoppen at http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=504 and then you get all the posts from these nine blogs.