“Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010,” said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media. Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said: “While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I’ve been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground.”

The focus is on local political decision making, and Bunz draws a parallell to the public subsidy NPR has received in the States, pondering if this might be a model for the UK too. Another option is funding from organizations like the Knight Foundation.

In Sweden we’ve seen several local newspapers/sites collaborating with bloggers for local and hyperlocal news (one recent example is Smålandsposten’s Mitt Lammhult), but the national papers seem less prone to. The largest daily Aftonbladet still has its locally contracted bloggers on the larger cities’ pages on Bloggportalen – for instance Norrköpingsbloggen on the Norrköping page – but with the loss of the local sections on Aftonbladet.se I doubt they get much public or journalistic attention. A lot of them are no longer active.
At the same time there are cities and even whole regions who lack journalists covering them, reports Swedish journalists’ union’s paper Journalisten (unfortunately I can’t find the article available online).
It’s not a problem in itself if national media skip local coverage as long as there are local initiatives – by journalistic sites of bloggers with an interest in these issues. Where they’re lacking, though, there’s a danger that corruption spreads.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Aftonbladet.se.

So for the sake of argument, let’s reverse the question: is there something to be gained by the end of newspapers as we know them in this historical moment?

The two rivalling tabloids joining forces is interesting in itself, though it’s not the first time it’s happened. Campaigns in the past has made them join forces.
What’s really exciting is how this exchange took place, and where – on Twitter, where anyone could and did see and comment on the initiative. A lot of retweets tonight. Having two social/citizen media friendly editors in chief at the two main tabloids promises an interesting time ahead. Looking forward to seeing where this development will lead.

Jan Helin on Twitter
Thomas Mattsson on Twitter

Update: More collaboration across publishing house borders, through Twitter – read this post from Publishing 2.0: Networked link journalism: A revolution quitely begins in Washington State

“One of the most important things that we need to think about and do is teach journalism to the next generation and to the new leaders within journalism,” said the BBC’s Kevin Marsh, at the DNA 2009 conferenceT in Brussels.

Every aspect of online training that is currently available to 7,500 BBC journalists will be open to the public.

I’ve read a number of posts lately about the education of the public into citizen journalists and educated readers. What do you think, is this the right way to go?

The site has received a lot of love in the comments in the sidebar. What I like most about it is the way that any story can be scrutinized paragraph by paragraph by adding questions and answers, thus providing a tool for collaborative fact-checking and discussion about the validity of statements. It is also a social tool, letting me know when my contacts have been active on the site. And it flattens the news hierarchy (though not completely – you cannot add questions or answers to stories posted by users, and those are limited to 250 words). The news can come from traditional news stories or from other members (through letters to the editor), questions can be posed by anyone, replied by anyone (not just the reporter/writer) and anyone can comment.

Joshua Pollock writes at the Crunchberry project blog:

it harnesses the credibility of an established media company, leverages existing online social networks and gives people a constructive way to interact with each other and the news.

Comments, called quips in News Mixer lingo, are limited to 140 characters, making them similar to microblogging posts.

And, last but not least, it’s open source. So Eastern Iowa will be the first site in what will probably be a long number of local and national efforts. Looking forward to see this evolve. I hope to see a Swedish site not too far off in the future.

Sandra Jakob works as an online journalist at hd.se. Helsingborgs Dagblad is a daily newspaper situated in the south of Sweden, in Helsingborg.

CMW: What are you thoughts about the editorial work at HD in the future. Do you think you will have to change the way you work and think differently about the way you are publishing your content?

Sandra thinks that they have to start to think about how to publish the news, based on the type of content, instead of the editorial staff.

– The process of integrating the different channels into each other will be more important. I think that it will somehow be the ultimate test to see which newspaper that will make it out of this big crisis that we are in, that everybody is so afraid of.

– If we are starting to think about how we are going to, all together, work towards a goal of reaching out with our information and news. Then we are going to be successful, Sandra says.

CMW: Why are journalists avoiding to embrace the internet and use it the way it can be used? Is it about fear, laziness or convenience?

Sandra does not think it is laziness and it is not the lack of journalistic confidence. She thinks it is about fear. Not knowing how to use the technical tools and how to communicate on the web.

– You just have to somehow go over the threshold and try it once for yourself and see that you can’t ruin everything. We have backup systems, she says.

Sandra thinks that the biggest challenge of reaching out to a journalist who is not used to working with the internet, is to show them that it is not dangerous. It is not going to make them look stupid. That it is going to help them and that is going to change the way they will go about their work in the future.

– People that are very humble and say that: ”I don’t know this but I’m willing to learn,” that’s an amazing start. If I just get that, I am very happy, she says.

When Sandra teaches her colleagues at hd.se how to use the blog tool, they sit down and walk it through step by step. After trying it out for themselves for a while, they do think it is so much fun and easy. She believes that you should not be afraid of the blogs just because the word blog is misused by a lot of people, it is an information source like everything else.

Sandra did work for Mindpark earlier this year. Mindpark is a web developing agency with the swedish morning newspaper industry as its main clients and beneficiaries.

Sandra Jakob and Joakim Jardenberg had this conversation (in Swedish) on her first day at work.

[Roughly translated]: The conversation, which contained nine parts of laughter and one part of seriousness (before the editing) was about why journalists should blog, why user generated content is a good thing and a little about where Rubbet is heading. [Published at mindpark.se 2008 03 06]

Joakim asked Sandra if she could come up with a more suitable word for the concept user generated content. She promised to think about it.

CMW repeated that question and asked her if she had managed to find a better word for the interchange of content and information:

Sandra has thought about it but she thinks it is hard to find a new word, because it is user generated content. Even though she does not like the word user.

- They are people that we work with, because they send us their pictures and their movies. They call us and give us information, she says.

Sandra believes that user generated content is the best terminology at the moment.

In the Mindpark sofa, Sandra also talked about the need of linking to the blog, as the original source of the news or the conversation.

CMW asked her if she still thinks it is the way to work. Does hd.se link to bloggers and external sites?

– Yes, I still think it is is the only way to go, Sandra says.

Sandra think it is important to pick up subjects that people are talking about and that it is important to give credit to the person that wrote about it on her/his blog. She thinks that if they start a conversation about the subject, it will only benefit the newspaper in the future. Sandra hopes that people will see that the newspaper do respect their work and what they are doing and that they do want to be in contact with them.

Sandra has not yet any example of a local blogger that has been creating any news for hd.se, but she does hope that it will happen soon. But they have been writing about bloggers and the internet.

– Then we are always make sure that we do link back to the person that we are writing about, she says.

CMW: The web is about conversations and expressing personal thoughts. Do you think that journalists should be more open with their personal opinions?

Sandra has an example from hd.se sports blog Sportbloggen. In the beginning they were only linking to funny YouTube clips.

– It did generate a lot of ha ha-comments, but it is nothing that will draw attention in the end, Sandra says.

She advised them to have a personal opinion. If they can have that in a column in the newspaper they can have that on a blog too.

– But, you have to think about it. What am I comfortable with saying? Can I stand for this?, Sandra says.

Sandra believes that you have to be comfortable with what you are saying on the blog. If your are not, maybe you should not do it. They want their journalists to blog, but everybody might not be comfortable doing it.

- If you are open with where you stand and what you think, the audience is going to respect you more, she says.

CMW: How are journalists going to handle transparency? Is there a good transparency level for a journalist?

– There is a bad transparency level, let’s start with that, it is so much easier, Sandra says.

She thinks that a bad transparency is when you tell everybody who gave you that tip. All of their sources are protected by the Swedish law. But a good level of transparency would be to be more open with the process of working as a journalist. It could be as a blog where you write about what kind of seminars and conferences you go to and tell more about how you find information about the subject you are writing about.

– I would love to see somebody who writes about the process and all the frustration there is to be a journalist. It is not always that fun even though we love it. Because there are people hanging up on you, people not liking you. Maybe you get the answers that you would like but it still doesn’t happened. Or you don’t get the result you would like to have, Sandra says.

She believes that bad transparency is when you tell people exactly who told you what, that is gossip. Good transparency is being open with the process, how you think, how you work, how you relate to your readers – both negatively and positively. And It is important to be honest.

– Because if you’re not honest, in the end it is coming back to bite you, Sandra says.

CMW: Do you still think that the internet is something good and useful for a journalist?

As a curious journalist Sandra does think that internet is an amazing way of possibilities and she loves the conversation that is going on out there, even though you have to be critical as usual against information and disinformation.

Sandra talks about the way the Swedish blogs handled the FRA affair. She thinks that it is a good example of a subject raised by bloggers and that ended up as a discussion in old media.

– I can only see the internet as a very positive thing, she says.

CMW: What do you think the newspaper will look like within five years. Do you think that they are still going to exist in print?

Sandra does still believe in the printed newspaper but not the way it looks like today. But she thinks it should be more of a magazine and not be distributed seven days a week. Maybe three days a week, or just over the weekend. A magazine that is going to be customized. More feature, more background and more thoughts.

– I still believe in print in some other way than we have today. The feeling of using print paper and have it in your hand, is something that we can not replace with a PDA or a mobile phone, she says.

CMW: Where do you see yourself with in five years?

Sandra hopes she will be able to dedicate herself full time working with inspiring colleagues to use the internet in a useful way. Integrating and developing newsrooms for the internet. She hopes to be working, not with in the news rush, but with people that works with news and that are interested in new ways to come out with their information and keep track on what is happening on the internet.

– I love developing stuff for newsrooms and news organizations. I hope I will be able to work with something like that, she says.

Sandra Jakob ends our conversation with a request. Sandra would like to have a conversation about online journalism if you are interested, you are welcome to contact her at sandra.jakob@hd.se.

And of course and as always, you are welcome to post your thoughts about this subject as a comment.

Related post: Will there be a dark period for journalism? Joakim Jardenberg at Mindpark on how Helsingborgs Dagblad can survive as an online paper. A version in Swedish at mindpark.se.

There are good examples of microblogging serving a journalistic purpose, though these initiative do not necessarily come from professional journalists.

• The Twitter Vote Report is one, where Americans across the country made short reports on how the voting in the US election was really going, using hashtags to pinpoint where they were and what their report was about, for instance #machine for problems with the voting machines. They also reported on waiting times. It all ended up on a big map where you could follow the progress in real time.
• Get eye-witness reports and comments. For instance check out this Twitter channel on the bombings in Mumbai. More on the Mumbai coverage here.
• Live reporting from an event. By using an established microblogging site you get comments from site members and you invite them in a natural way.
• Live commentary to tv shows. One example is Drive on Fox.
• Coming up with questions for interviews. By asking people what they want to know from a person you’re to interview you get more interesting questions, and you know you’re asking stuff your audience want to know.
• Local news gathering. Here’s an interesting example from Harrisonburg, VA. Or even as a source for bigger breaking news.
• Cynthia McCune talks about microblogging as a “21st century police scanner”, listing these uses for reporters: keep up with sources, get quick feedback, get referrals, post live updates to sport scores.
• Breaking news. Anders Brenna at digi.no writes: “Twitter is both the perfect journalist tool for being first with breaking news, and the best relief from the tyranny of breaking news.” Super-fast publishing of the latest news without risking that the reader won’t come to your site for the full story. You can even send a message and point to it once it’s out.
• Paul Bradshaw has some advice for anyone wanting to use microblogging to cover a topic. Check out the comments too for a few ideas on good use.
• Another post on how news makers have to change and use micro-blogging tools.

Do you have more good examples? We’ll collect them and update this list (giving you credit, of course).

Also, here’s some advice on what not to do.

The fear I hear constantly is that investigative journalism will be the first form to die. That would be foolish and news organizations will learn that. In a link-and-search economy, you must create unique content with strong value to get attention and audience. Investigations matter more than ever; they will have greater audience and thus business benefit.

Today the BBC is collaborating with the site by sponsoring the feature called “the 12second challenge”, a daily question that users reply to. Users get to reply to the question “Economic downturn – how bad can it get? Give some examples.” The replies may then appear on BBC TV.

Further, 12seconds.tv today announced to its users plans to involve them in extensive coverage of the US election day.

In an email to the service’s users, the 12seconds team writes:

Citizen Journalism is pretty important for the health of a democracy. For this reason, we’re going to put a lot of effort into Election Day. Where appropriate (and legal) we’d like 12ers covering reactions, parties, exit polls and emotions on November 4th all over the world. We’re assembling a team of people and will feature their content on Election Day.

Over the past week, Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog has been publishing a series of posts based on a survey he’s conducted with 200 blogging journalists from 30 countries, mentioned ealier here at Citizen Media Watch.
The aim of the study was to find out how the journalists perceive that their work has changed after they became bloggers. The areas of interest are idea generation, information gathering and production, with the addition of the relationship with the (former) audience and post-publication.

Today the final post was published along with the conclusions from the survey. I do recommend reading all the posts about it. The results shows variations in responses depending on what field the journalists cover and in what medium.

For a summary, what the journalists perceived had changed were:
- their understanding of their audience’s wants and needs (through feedback and stats) and an improved relationship with the audience
- their work-process, which included the former audience in the research phase before a story was published, as a “two-way, ongoing process”, sometimes crowdsourcing
- they thought more about multimedia and interactivity, and published more multimedia material
- a wider range of news sources, and with that a deeper understanding of how trust is built online
- a greater need for speed, sometimes beneficial, sometimes resulting in publishing rumours
- they said they are digging deeper than before
- writing looser, more personal and less formal
- they broke news on the blog first, then followed up in their traditional medium
- possibilities of exploring “minor” stories that barely made it into their traditional medium
- more linking to external sources/stories
- stories last longer, as the conversation with the former audience lives on and generates new angles/leads
- an increased tendency to use microblogging and social bookmarking to draw attention to a story
- they appreciate other bloggers more than before

The part I found the most interesting was the bit about the conversation. I’ve long been talking about the changed role of the journalist, and being interested in what your commenters have to say, and responding to it, is key.

Bradshaw writes:

The ability to enter into correspondence with users, to fix errors and post updates were frequently identified as changing journalistic work, turning on its head Lowrey’s sugestion that bloggers “often emphasise immediacy and opinion at the expense of accuracy” (2006) and that journalism would protect itself by focusing on editing; responses suggest that, conversely, journalists are relying on commenters to contribute to the editing process.

Without an interest in the audience, blogging is not a conversation. Without conversation, you’re missing some of the great opportunities that blogging brings.

Excellent clip from WAN in Gothenburg, provided by Medievärlden. Pierre Haski of Rue89.com on how to take your readers seriously and get good quality comments and a good debate.

More at Medievärlden (in Swedish).

1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away

I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.

11. Personal transparency

As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.

I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.

“For the second year in a row we have documented a crisis in American journalism that is far more serious than the industry’s business challenges – or maybe a consequence of them,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. “Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present. Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news – so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex. They need to invest in new products and services – and they have. But they’ve also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s a moral and leadership challenge – and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it.”

Here’s what the post on Nettby says (my translation):

If you have a suggestion for a Swedish name on a service like Nettby, send it to us! We will pick the top 10 suggestions and reward them with a 6 month Nettby Max subscription and Nettby t-shirts.
The person making the suggestion we decide to use will receive an Ipod Touch!

We compensate by creating new channels, such as the website and free papers.
- We have expanded our reach at HD. The way we connect to people is not important. The important thing is that we keep on delivering eyeballs to our advertisers.

We still idealize paper publishing. Joakim turned to me to give the example of Aftonbladet’s blog service, where the key point is that you can be published in the paper (well, one of the benefits, I’d say having your blog post appear at aftonbladet.se’s main page is just as appealing). Another example is that Beata Wickbom is very happy about the Sime supplement in SvD (the above image).

The day we can utilize our journalists and have them collaborate with their audience we can use their competence much better, Jardenberg says.
- The old and new worlds are at war. Get over it!

Check out Jocke’s slides from Daytona Sessions here.

Swedish company Primelabs has provided MSM with blog link widgets through its Twingly service since February. Dailies DN and SvD were first out, followed by among others Idg, Dagen and Mindpark. While this is a great service, some of the sites only show the headlines, without even mentioning from which blog the headline comes.
We wanted to do more, to provide a tool to give an instant idea of what the blogosphere is saying on a topic, and also to guide the readers so that they know before they click on a blog link not only which blog it is, but also who is behind it.

In Aftonbladet’s blog listings, which come from the blog catalogue service Bloggportalen, you get the headline of the blog post (linked to the post), you get the name of the blog, and if you hover your cursor above it you get a photo and information about the blog/blogger. There’s also a three line excerpt from the post.

So far the initiative has received mainly positive feedback, though some concerns have been voiced that the blogosphere will become less interesting if it starts to follow the agenda set by MSM even more than today. I think this might be true to some extent, but I also think there are a lot of bloggers out there who blog not only for the traffic but because they have something important to say, and they will keep saying it.
I also hope that MSM will learn to showcase great examples of uniqe topics and angles from blogs. This is certainly my ambition in my work at Läsarbladet.

More about Aftonbladet’s blog links at my Swedish blog Bloggvärldsbloggen:
Smygpremiär för blogglänkar på Aftonbladets artiklar
Nästa steg: ytterligare tolv avdelningar har blogglänkar

It is of course too early to write a review, other than that it’s a good thing that SVT has understood that they can’t dictate the viewers’ options, but need a more open attitude. Most importantly, SVT needs to understand that they can’t have a YouTube channel that works as a branch of the press department, with trailers of upcoming shows only. There is a need for an active editor: someone who can find the gems in the daily production and publish them.
If they don’t do that, the viewers will do it themselves, and then the point of the channel is lost for SVT.

I’m inclined to agree. This first effort is a start, but it doesn’t take them a very long way. Yet I can’t even imagine how this step is perceived in the concrete bunker in which the SVT is housed. To many people there I’m sure it’s a revolution, and I suspect they are not all happy about it. Old organizations are usually not the fastest movers.

Behind the move is Berlingske’s new editor-in-chief, Lisbeth Knudsen. According to New Media Trends, she says the new strategy has “earthquake” like dimensions.

As Jon Lund at New Media Trends points out, there are a number of challenges to face for Berlingske.
Having traditional journalists refocus on web publishing takes time and energy. One important aspect is that the print journalists will find out what it’s like to get instant feedback within seconds of writing an article, and they’ll learn to start to think of publishing as communication. The result will hopefully result in better products, both online and in print.

On the whole it was an odd situation, being in a debate with my employer’s main competitor suddenly on my side, and the other side consisting of representatives of my own trade union. These are strange times.
It was however a good and necessary debate which high-lighted for me some of the dangers of the conservatism in the press corps.

There are two ways to explore the stories, either by clicking the “play the story” button, in which case you get the full multimedia experience with a satellite image background, music and text, photos and video clips telling a step-by-step story. Unfortunately many of them are over-done, having music with lyrics in the background while you’re supposed to read small and quite blurred text which disappears too quickly. The most engaging story is The bible on the beach, though that one raises a lot of other questions. Nowhere do we get to know if this is a fictional or true story. If it’s true, there are a lot of objections to be made. If not, that should be made clear.
The Guerilla gardening story also works okay.

The other way of exploring the stories is by clicking the dots/signs on each story’s map. That doesn’t work well at all. The navigation leaves a lot to be asked for. It sometimes, for instance on the “Tree Survey”, brings you away from the map of photos/video clips once you click to view one of them. In other places you still get to see the map with the geotagged photos, but if you’ve zoomed in you lose the zoom once you click on a photo and have to re-zoom (and re-zoom you have to, since the standard view of the map is so much zoomed out that the photo dots are on top of eachother). If you use the Next and Previous links there are no indications on the map which dot represent the photo your looking at.

However, it is an interesting experiment, and a first step towards using geotagging in story-telling. The main flaws in the second way of story exploration are actually due to less than perfect site building, not the way the students have carried out the projects.

With some more training, this could mature into something quite interesting. But it is important to remember that a web audience usually wants to be active – clicking the forward arrows in the multimedia needs to work flawlessly. And clicking your way around a map needs to work without the map reloading and zooming when you haven’t asked it to.

As for the “citizen media” aspect, I see no way to contribute to the site, though it says you can comment as a registered user. That doesn’t seem to include the general public, or the link is well hidden. But I guess the citizen journalism part is referring to the students not being trained journalists.

Disclosure disclaimer: VG is Aftonbladet’s sister paper, with many collaborations between the sites.

In addition to the movie spoof award, MTV, Yahoo and Burnett are developing a section on the site where viewers can comment on the user-generated submissions, as well as post photos and videos. Content from the site will then be integrated into the live broadcast on a “World Wide Web Wall.”

Users will also get to vote for categories such as “Best Kiss” and “Best Villain”.

Folha Online is the most important online newspaper in Brazil and the editorial office is situated in São Paulo.
Folha went online seven years ago. Fifty people work in shifts; there is always someone there to update the news, in the open landscape office.
The website has about 700 000–1 million visitors per day. The number of Internet users in Brazil, and their online time, is increasing fast.

I check in as a visitor and the information board in the lobby tells me that it takes about four buildings to host the Folha Online, the Folha Newspaper and the Internet portal OUL, which Folha Online is a part of.

Ricardo Feltrin, 44 years old and the chief web editor, shows me the editorial office.
– People want to read about gossip and, in second place, about news, he says.
Ricardo has been working as a journalist for 16 years and he runs the web TV show “Ooops!”
It is all about national and international celebrities. The click rate is very good.
It is to be found on their Internet portal OUL. And Ricardo himself is a well-known character in São Paulo.

After being introduced to the staff and a quick walk through the website, it is time for lunch.
– What I would prefer to eat? You can find anything you want here in São Paulo, Ricardo says.
We grab a taxi and make the short trip from downtown SP to the part of the city that is called “Liberdade”. It is the Japanese district and a result of the labour immigration from the Asian country during the 19th century. It made São Paulo the “second city of Japan”.

We enjoy: dumplings, stuffed squid, extra ordinary sushi, and sashimi, while talking a bout life, travelling and Folha Online’s future.
Ricardo is worried. The owner of Folha (the Newspaper) and Folha Online is Octavio Friar de Oliviera. He is 94 years old and no one really knows what might happen when he is not around anymore.

We are having tempura (deep fried) ice cream for desert. This is one of the best Japanese restaurant is São Paulo. The artist behind the counter creates wonderful little masterpieces and you are allowed to bring you own fish and get it prepared.

In the taxi back to the Folha, I ask Ricardo Feltrin if they are using any user generated material, like blogs, on Folha Online?
He tells me that they only have their own bloggers, which are already connected to Folha Online.
Their first blog was the political blog and the author Josias de Souza did his first posting in October 2005. He was followed by Sonia Francine Gaspar Marmo. She writes about sport, a culture blog, a blog about gay people and a seven more blogs.

One of the Folha online bloggers is Marcelo Katsuki. He is 38 years old and works as a graphic designer at the online paper.
The name of his blog is “Comes & bebes” (food & drink). He tries to do at least one posting per day.
– I wanted to learn how to cook and did cookery course, he says and smiles.
Marcelo did hesitate when he was asked if he wanted to start a blog and write about food, drinks and cooking.
– There are people writing about gastronomy for the Folha newspaper and they are very good, but I decided to have a try, Marcelo says.
He did his first posting in August 2006.

His blog is divided in to a couple of different sections, which makes it possible to squeeze in about everything that falls with in the area of food.
He still has to buy the cookery books that he writes about.
– My friends tell me that I should not do that, but it is my hobby, Marcelo says.
His favourite cuisines are Thai, Brazilian-Bahian and Japanese.
– Normally I get about 5–10 comments on every posting. At first they were complaining about my writing, but now I am mostly getting positive comments, he says and gives me a kiss on the cheek, the way you do in Brazil, when we say good buy.

I guess I have to send a Swedish cookbook to Marcelo, when I get back to Stockholm. Even though Ricardo Feltrin tells me that he has heard that Sweden has got not quite so good food, but very nice women ; )

Birgitta Wilén, São Paulo, Brazil.

Read more about blogging and newspapers in Brazil at the International Symposium of Online Journalism

(via Beta Alfa)

I see this as the next step from the successful video clip toplists such as “Klipptoppen”, “Bebistoppen” and “Resatoppen”.

Twingly is developed by Primelabs, a Swedish research-oriented IT company. Here’s how they describe Twingly (my translation):

Twingly is a blog search engine and ping service which is the missing link between the blogging world and media. Twingly collects blogs from all over the world – already more than ten million blogs.
At twingly.se you can search among the Swedish blogs in our index.

It’s interesting to see that more and more news sites become aware of the importance to get closer to their readers. Linking to blogs is a good way of doing this, and twingly seems like a pretty good tool. Some questions have been raised about the news sites filtering the results though. The blogs featured in the link boxes are supposed to be the “most interesting” among those that link to the specific article. The sorting is done by Twingly, by relevance and what they call “blog authority”, along with the number of links from other blogs. Swedish blog internetbrus writes (my translation):

Whether it really is the most interesting posts [that appear in the link boxes] is hard to tell when you haven’t seen the posts that have been filtered out. Sure you can do a link search to find more posts, but as we wrote yesterday there are flaws in search engines’ link searches.

Media Culpa also reacts against the selection:

Apparently DN does not show all the incoming links that Twingly has in its database. In the Help section on the site, DN writes that you can find “a list of all blogs that link to an article on DN.se”. For some reason DN chooses to list only a selection of links. If this process turns out to filter out negative articles, then I expect an uproar in the blogosphere when bloggers find out they are being “censored”. Should DN continue to leave out a large part of the conversation they will most certainly open up for criticism.

With Germany’s biggest online presence, Spiegel Online making money, German publishers have figured out that the Web is here to stay. But citizen journalism has been slow to catch on and some of the hesitancy may be cultural.
“Germany’s civil society is not very familiar with the idea of one feeling entitled to publicly articulate himself,” said Christoph Neuberger, from the university of Muenster, “and journalism in Germany is always reproached with seeing its audience more like objects of influence than as responsible individuals that just want to inform themselves.”

Interestingly enough the Reader’s Edition uses Wordpress. (I’ve been looking at different CMSs for a hobby project lately, hence my interest. Right now I’m leaning towards Drupal. But Wordpress is still an option.)