New bloggers' code of conduct to combat eating disorders and unhealthy body image obsession

This summer saw the launch of a new bloggers' code of conduct focused on changing the unhealthy body image obsession of leading bloggers, and inspiring bloggers to blog more sensibly about issues such as health, food and fitness in order to be better, healthier role models.

Have you posted any anorexia inducing fitness blog posts with glam photos and ascetic dietary advice recently?

If so, a new Norwegian bloggers' code of conduct is aimed at getting you to take a more sensible, common sense approach to blogging about such issues.

Now if you read this blog you’re probably not one of these popular lifestyle bloggers this code of conduct is aimed at in the first place.

But its launch says a lot about the changing (social) media landscape, and how the image of what a blogger is has changed with it.

«Is your blog really a blog if it has no pictures of shoes on it?» Back in 2010 I blogged about how blogger and author Ida Jackson told Oslo’s first Twestival that she often was met with this question when she, a very successful «traditional» text-based blogger, was invited to give talks to to senior high school students in Norway about blogging.

Since then this glam lifestyle blogging trend has only accelerated.

These days, Norway’s top earning bloggers are mostly lifestyle or glam bloggers who write photo-heavy diary like blogs on personal fitness, dieting, fashion, design – and shoes. Some of these have reported annual incomes in the region of 1 million Norwegian kroners (about £109K with today’s currency rate), often from ads and sponsored content.

And with the increasing popularity (and media coverage) of this kind of blogs, the meaning of the term «blogger» has more and more become associated with glam bloggers rather than what to certain age groups are seen as «old school text-based bloggers» - if they are aware of this kind of text-based blogging style at all.

Enter the new «common sense» bloggers' code of conduct, launched by a group comprised of lifestyle bloggers, media company Egmont publishing, psychiatrist Finn Skårderud and representatives from blogging company United Influencers and media company Bonnier.

The initiative has been met with both praise and criticism. Praise for trying to address the blogging style of what many see as dangerously unhealthy teenage role models, criticism among other things for whether such a code really is needed in the first place – and for whether it was launched by people with vested interests.

The criticism it has been met with is not so dissimilar to the one previous attempts at launching any sort of bloggers' code of conduct has been met with, from early attempts to launch a code to regulate how glam bloggers’ present sponsored content - and all the way back to the debacle surrounding Tim O’Reilly’s attempt at launching a code of conduct for bloggers back in 2007.

But with the rise of often young glam bloggers, at times with heavily sponsored content and plenty of product placements, who inspire scores of very young and impressionable readers, is the «blogosphere», and a «blog» for that matter, really what is used to be? The old, unwritten code of conduct of "old-school" bloggers (of transparancy, always crediting your sources, linking out etc) is certainly not one this new school of bloggers abide by.

Here’s a quick translation of the key headlines of the new "Common Sense" code of conduct so you can judge the initiative for yourself (any translation inaccuracies is all down to me, you can find the full code of conduct in Norwegian here):  

The common sense code of conduct

1. Avoid writing how much you weigh, BMI, calorie intake, waist circumference, arm circumference and similar numbers. Remember that you have young readers that compare themselves with you.
2. Avoid being too rigid when writing about the positive or negative aspects of a single food or a lifestyle. Remember that you write from your own experience and not a professional one. What is good for you is not necessarily good for everyone else.
3. Photo editing programs might be good for adjusting the light, colours and views, but avoid changing body size or shape.
4. Feel free to share food and fitness inspiration, but be good at emphasizing whom it is meant for - and that not everyone runs as fast, weighs as much or need to change anything. Remember that you have no control over who is reading what you post online. Even if you have a core group of regular readers who comment, you also have readers who are younger and older, healthier and sicker.
5. Focus on the pleasure of exercising rather than how far you run or how many repetitions you take. Remember that you don’t have to write about every time you exercise in order to share fitness inspiration. If you post a fitness program, remember to explain who it is created for and not.
6. When writing about food, feel free to share pictures of your cooking, table or meals, but be conscious of the impact of posting photos that show the size of your portions. Show particular consideration if your own portion is small.
7. If you write about clothes, avoid writing what dress size you use. Remember that readers do not know you in real life, and may be just guessing whether their bodies are equal or not.
8. Be  aware of the total amount of images you put out there that is focused on your body. A body in a bikini is natural on a beach, but consider the scale of what is natural in other settings. Show what is behind the facade and post realistic images of yourself once in a while.
9. Be cautious about sharing information about your cosmetic surgery. Acquaint yourself with what the law says about marketing cosmetic surgery
10. If you are approached by readers who say they are ill or are having a difficult time, send them to professionals. “Mental Health” has a free 24/7 telephone helpline for people who need someone to talk to. Phone: 116 123 Those who find it difficult to talk to someone can get help in writing via Mental Health's online service.

 

Female speakers you need at your next journalism event

Here are 10 female speakers that would be brilliant speakers for your next media event.

Recently I found my name on this amazing list of «103 speakers you need at your next journalism event to avoid all male panels», compiled by Journalism.co.uk’s Agbigail Edge.

I was very honoured to be included in such amazing company, I love the initiative «to relegate all-male panels to the Mad Men era where they belong» - and there are quite a few other names I would like to add to such a list.

Naturally, the list predominantly includes British and American speakers, but Abigail’s brilliant initiative had me thinking that we need such lists for Norway, Sweden and Denmark too, as: 1) Scandinavian, and especially Norwegian, media are at the forefront of online innovation, and 2) we have a lot of very competent female media leaders and speakers here.

I’ve started to make plans to create such a list for Norway with a collaborator or two, but in the meantime – here are  10 Norwegian female speakers who have impressed me while giving talks to an international audience on issues on or related to journalism and the changing media landscape.

I’ve had the privilege to hear a great many excellent Norwegian female speakers give inspiring talks on a wide range of issues, but for this purpose I’ve only included some who have impressed me while giving talks in English on, or related to, the media industry (I might easily have forgotten names here and hope to get back with a more thorough list later).

I must admit that when I started out as a journalist I often found myself in all-male newsrooms or other all-male settings and didn’t give this too much thought. But it became more and more apparent to me that there was a major issue to be addressed here when I was covering national and international media and tech conferences. Looking through my photos from these events they were almost exclusively photos of men in suits.

In other words, the speaker line-up of left a lot to be desired in terms of diversity, both in terms of the lack of women speakers but also in terms of more diverse speakers in general. It was also an issue I became increasingly more aware of when organising major media conferences myself when I was head of The Norwegian Online News Association (NONA).

Abigail’s list of «103 non-male speakers you need at your next journalism conference» includes two Norwegian women, Liv Håker-Ottesen, development editor of Sunnmørsposten, and myself. I was privileged enough to hear Liv give an impressive (and highly entertaining) talk during NONA16, just a day before this list was published, so it was great to see her high up on this list at no 16.

In addition, here are 10 other Norwegian women speakers who’ve impressed me while giving talks on the media industry or media related issues to an international audience:

• Ingeborg Volan, current president of Norwegian Online News Association (NONA), Development editor at Adresseavisen, former Head of Social Media at The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK).

• Bente Kalsnes, PhD student researching social media and politics, long time blogger, media columnist for weekly newspaper Morgenbladet, former journalist and community editor, one of the founders of Girl Geek Dinners Oslo

• Ida Jackson, advisor at Netlife Research, a content-driven digital design agency, author (including a book on social media), one of Norway’s best known bloggers, columnist for Dagbladet.

• Ida Aalen, advisor and UX-expert at Netlife Research, columinst for Dagens Næringsliv’s media section, author of two books on social media, long time blogger, former board member of NONA

• Anette Melbye, head of mobile, Aftenposten

• Hildegunn Soldal, digital development editor Dagbladet and Aller Media, former executive producer multimedia at The Guardian, former board member of NONA.

• Kjersti Løken Stavrum, Secretary general of the Norwegian Press Association (the organisation that administers the press complaints process in Norway), former editor of Aftenposten and KK

• Jill Walker Rettberg, professor of Digital Culture, University of Bergen (UIB), author of several books on social media, long time blogger, worth following on Snapchat for news on social media research and how researchers can use Snapchat

• Runa A. Sandvik, director of Information Security at The New York Times, Tor Advocate

• Deehya Khan, Emmy and Peabody Award winning Documentary Filmmaker, #Banaz A Love Story. #JIHAD. CEO of production company @Fuuse. Founder of @sister_hood_mag

Now this is to name but a few, just to get started. There are, as I mentioned, many more who should be on such a list – but I feel I need to get others involved in the project in order to make a more comprehensive list as we’re all shaped (and limited) by our experience, background and networks.

It must also be said that in a brilliant initiative, Women Speakers is continuously compiling an extensive list of Norwegian female speakers by way of crowdsourcing/self-reporting – and even though that list is more geared towards tech and marketing, that is absolutely an initiative to be inspired by.

Below, a shot from Ida Aalen (left) and Ida Jackson's (right) brilliant and inspiring talk during Webdagene 2014 on making a once doomed online encylopedia succeed online:

Ex-Chartbeat CEO: What data tells us about the world of platforms

The image that «crappy content» does well traffic wise is simply wrong, and how Facebook dominates traffic is changing user behaviour, the economics of content and more, said Tony Haile, former CEO of web analytics company Chartbeat, during a keynote in Oslo recently.

Haile, founding CEO of Chartbeat, recently gave a keynote  on «What data tells us about the world of platforms» during the annual conference of The Norwegian Online Association (NONA) in Oslo.

Today’s news that Facebook’s rise as a news source hits publisher’s revenue (and the annual report on digital news from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism) only makes some of the things Haile talked about more relevant, but as there was plenty of food for thought in his talk I’ll just leave you with a lightly edited version of my notes from the talk.

«There are five things media companies do: create, host, curate, distribute, monetize. Of these five, Facebook now does four. So it is worth thinking about what that means as we go forward as an industry,» Haile said, and went on:

No one metric to rule them all

One of the things we find is that when talking to analysts they say there is no one metric to rule them all. They have to use a lot of different metrics and put it all together, but when they tell that to the commercial side of things it is as if they are talking different languages.

Often the people on the commercial side talk of a singular metric, and they end up using just one metric as a report card and that causes problems.

One such «report card» is page views, and that causes problems – among other things because most page views get extremely short exposure and have a massive bounce rate.

Viewability restores your faith in humanity

With the onset of viewability [an online advertising metric that aims to track only impressions that can actually be seen by users], this created a big change on the ad side because it matters what people do after they click, it matters if they read the content.

And when you look at that overview you get when you measure such things, it restores your faith in humanity. If you look beyond clicks and look at what gets reads but not clicks, it gives you a very different dataset.

It’s about the kind of data you choose: If you’re actually looking at the data of what people are reading and what they’re engaging with you’ll find that the image that «crappy content» does well traffic wise is simply wrong.

Page views on its own is a very problematic metric.

Zero correlation between shares and reads

So what do we have if not page views? We have social media. But there is zero correlation between the amount of shares and the amount of reads, between what people share and what they read.

Haile shows us an article from The Atlantic from March 2015 that did really well traffic wise , «What ISIS really wants»,  and tells us 60% of the traffic came from mobile (which proves people will read long stories on mobile). There was a distinct long tale effect, the article saw new spikes in traffic after e.g. the Paris terror.

«Twitter doesn’t drive meaningful traffic»

Desktop and mobile is not zero sum. Facebook dominates traffic. Mobile traffic often equals social, and social often equals Facebook – Facebook utterly dominates.

This is often a challenge for the news industry as we like Twitter, but our audience is on Facebook. According to Haile, Twitter doesn’t drive meaningful traffic. Facebook gives instant traffic boost, but Google stabilises traffic over time.

Google owns the lulls (long tail)

The total amount of attention is the closest metric we come for measuring quality.

«Of these five things we do, distribution is now very much in the hands of Facebook – and it’s actually starting to change user behaviour on sites,» said Haile.

People come from social apps and trust the apps more than they trust the stream, and that’s challenging.

Facebook changes the economics of content

It causes trouble for how we think about the economics of content because content [in the media industry] has always been bundled.

The rational for creating content which is uneconomic on its own, but is so important for media democracy,  starts to become challenging in this new landscape.

New companies with a very different cost base are starting to pop up, they don’t have their own sites – their strategy is just to be out there on the platforms.

We have to understand the power of the platforms. It may not be worthwhile to invest all that money in this shiny new CMS [Content Management System] anymore.

Your brand needs to be within the content itself

You have to think about the quantifiable value of your brand. The brand needs to be within the content itself, there is no use talking about a new logo or redesign when content can travel freely separate from your site.

The single most important thing you can to do is to nurture as many different platforms as possible as we’re increasingly moving to a platform world.

There is now a sneaking sympathy for those legacy media who have printing presses. If these trends continue, a lot of those things we have invested so heavily in in the media industry won’t have any value

The challenge for classic media companies is how to compete with these start-ups. Classic media companies’ infrastructure is increasingly becoming irrelevant. There are going to be new sorts of companies coming through

As a closing note, Haile said he is starting a new company this week.

«I think journalism is important for democracy but journalism isn’t being paid, and we have to solve that. I wonder if there is a broad-based solution for a subscription-based service where you’re not constantly distracted from the good content you want to read.»

More on Haile’s thoughts on the futility of the «click economy» here (via Ingeborg Volan).

Faceball: How to make your story go viral using the phone

How do you make a news story go viral again? Well, you call people or email them asking to share your story on Facebook, Twitter etc, right? Especially those you’ve quoted in the story.

You use your finely honed journalistic skills, such as your immaculate powers of persuasion and impressive contact book, phoning contacts en masse to make them share the stories you’ve written that are relevant to them all over the social web, right?

At least that’s what you might do if you are Mette Bugge, sports journalist at Schibsted-owned Aftenposten, and take to this brave new social media world of ours like a fish in the water:

Naturally employing every trick in the book from your almost 40 years in journalism to make the social web work for you.

Bugge will share these insights into how she works with social media and distribution during «Kommunikasjonsdagen», a big national conference for the Norwegian communications industry in Oslo today (hashtag: #Komdagen ).

I’m able to share some of them here ahead of her talk, as I was privileged enough to listen to her during a smaller, Girl Geek Dinners Oslo, event last year.

To describe what happens when a story really takes off on Facebook - or goes viral / receives a massive amount of likes and shares – Bugge uses the endearing term «Faceball», and she uses it as a verb (as in «to Faceball» or «a story Faceballs / Faceballed».)

On the photo I've shared below, she explained that she uses the term "Faceball" to describe 'when a story starts 'to roll by itself on Facebook'. It's similar to, but obviously not the same, as to "snowball" , a term I believe Doc Searls coined many years ago, which I've written about here.

I was very taken in with Bugge’s enthusiastic talk, especially since a lot of the stories she covers have sources that are far from the early adapter crowd, such as local sports clubs, and might only be too happy to receive a friendly reminder via email or phone.

It only goes to prove that, as Jay Rosen said some time back when introducing this story on Connie Schultz: «Good journalists (of any age) are naturals at social media, if they take the time to learn the form and do it right» - and perhaps, one might add: even better when they merge their traditional journalism skills with digital journalism skills.

NB: Mette Bugge was presenting at Girl Geek Dinners Oslo in her capacity as on of the «spearheads», or digital ambassadors if you like, for Aftenposten's "Digital Spearheads"-project, read more about this here.

 

Faceball=når en sak virkelig begynner å rulle på Facebook. Godt konsept fra Mette Bugges herlige foredrag om hvordan hun jobber m distribusjon i sosiale medier under @girlgeekdinnersoslo hos @aftenposten #Facebook #Faceball #ggdo #aftenposten #sosialemedier

A photo posted by Kristine Lowe (@kristinelowe1) on Jan 27, 2015 at 10:40am PST

 

 PST

Moving beyond the early adopter approach to digital transformation

When Mette Bugge talked to Girl Geek Dinners Oslo on how to make a story Faceball (see this blogpost) it was also to present Aftenposten’s «Digital Spearheads»-project, launched to «increase reading and engagement by empowering our reporters» and nominated for INMA2015 awards, category "best idea to grow digital audience or engagement".

She was presenting in her capacity as one of the «spearheads», or digital ambassadors if you like. The job of such an ambassador was to be an ambassador and motivator for digital development , and the «spearhead group» was made up of more or less one reporter from each department in the newspaper.

Crucial to the success of this project, Aftenposten-journalist Hanne Mellingsæter told the annual conference of Norwegian Online New Association (NONA) last May, was that the journalists in each department could identify with «their» digital ambassador.

The project was introduced like this in the nomination text for the INMA 2015 awards:

«Our challenge: How do we educate and empower our reporters, so they can make more visual, interesting, stickier and better digital journalism? How do we create a culture that encourages out of the box-thinking and an experimental approach? And how do we make sure that better digital storytelling results in more people using Aftenposten’s products more often - and spend more time on each visit?

«Historically, we have tried various approaches in order to increase the digital competence and build a truly digital culture in our newsroom. Honestly, most of them with limited success.

«Solution: This time we decided to do it differently by establishing a group of “digital spearheads”. We picked one reporter from each department who were asked to experiment, learn and share by using new tools, and making and presenting our content in new ways.

«The "spearheads" should be both front-runners and provide support for the other reporters in the department. This group meets every week to discuss challenges and methodology. From the beginning, the idea has been to spread the techniques and tools that we see have an impact on reading and engagement.» Read the full nomination text here.

The days of taking «the early adopter approach to digital transformation», by bringing in early adopters to engineer digital transformation and perhaps train the rest of the organisation, seems – luckily – to be long gone. In this day and age it takes the concerted commitment of the entire organisation.

Now as to to what extent that really is happening, I’m uncertain. I’ve heard of at least one other news organisation where the initial result of setting all the «most digitally skilled» to train those not so skilled or inclined was to stifle innovation, so all stories of success in this respect is heartening.

Key effects of the «Digital Spearhead» project per May 20015:

- Increased digital skills: massive increase in editorial staff mastering various digital tools and systems, resulting in better articles and more effective production

- Building a digital culture: increased adaptability, higher motivation and a more widespread eagerness to improve oneself

- Improved reading time on selected articles

- Better Google-ranking

- Improved click-through-rate

- More shares in social media on selected articles.

What if no op-eds or letters to the editor were refused?

This Wednesday Schibsted-owned Aftenposten published all op-eds and letters to the editor that had been submitted within a 27 hour interval, both in print and online. The newspaper explains the stunt here. (in Norwegian).

I found the experiment refreshing and would love to see it repeated.

Even though it took me until this weekend to find time to sift through the six op-eds and 78 letters to the editor, and I didn't read every single one of them, I read more, and from more varied perspectives than in a long time. Although Aftenposten has been critizised, to some extent rightly, for giving the stunt the tagline  "What Norwegians really think", which the stunt really can't be said to fully represent, I still think it served to broaden the debate, or public discourse if you like, in a healthy way.

A fair share of the news and opinion I read I get via blogs and social media, and the sources are so diverse it feels unfair to call this a filter bubble, but in some respects it probably is (due to factors such as common interests, similar educational background etc). Another reason why Aftenposten's stunt was so refreshing...

 

Love this: What if no op-eds or letters to the editor were refused? @aftenposten has published all that were submitted within a 27 hours interval today - looking forward to read #media #opeds #letterstotheeditor #innovation #publicdiscourse

A photo posted by Kristine Lowe (@kristinelowe1) on Feb 16, 2016 at 11:45pm PST

David Ho on our wired lives and the future of digital journalism

There are now more mobile devices than people on earth: What does that mean for journalism, for digital design and for our lives?

For one, «print newspapers might outlast websites in their current form because websites are changing so fast», David Ho, Wall Street Journal’s Executive Mobile Editor, predicted  during a talk on mobile journalism and responsive design in Oslo this week.

Currently there are more than 7,2 billion mobile devices in service in the world. As of last year, there are more mobile devices than people on earth. There are bout 2 billion smart phones in the world. More than 60% of all US digital time is spent on mobile. Most of that is spent on apps, rather than websites.

Ho said that in a sense every aspect of our lives is now becoming wired and chipped, a trend he described as very cool and very unsettling at the same time: very exciting and a bit Orwellian.

«We are moving towards a world where there’s a chip in everything...  A world with more data collection and less privacy, and if you really want privacy you have to go out of your way to get it,» he said.

We’ve been talking about that privacy challenge for so many years now that it’s hardly news.

But I think it is as if we’ve seen the overall mobile trends for a very long time, while the implications for how we live our lives (and consequently for the news industry) have  only come into full focus more recently. As a result, I found the talk by Ho, organised by the Norwegian Institute for Journalism (IJ), interesting - even though much of the things he talked about were not all that new.

As a former technology journalist and mobile (smartphones & tablets) columnist I’ve been to countless such talks by major players in the industry, but it’s as if five years ago, when many were (wrongly)  predicting how the iPad would bring about a new golden age for journalism, we saw only the blurry outline of the mobile future. But as this picture has come more and more into focus, details have appeared which makes the overall picture much clearer. And Ho’s talk brought a lot of this together, which is why I find it interesting to dwell on and summarise in a blog post.

I am aware that David Ho also was the keynote speaker at last summer’s Newsrewired in London, so I’ve summarised the points from his talk in Oslo I found most interesting in a bullet point list to make it easier to scan for new/old insights.

At the start of his talk, he had everyone in the room, mostly media folks, unlock their smartphones and hand it to the the person sitting next to them: An experiment which had many people in the room feeling decidedly uncomfortable.

He used this experiment to illustrate how «we are our phones». Our smartphones hold our contacts, our family, friends, work documents, email, photos –  they organise our entire lives.

We’ve never had «a technology this personal and this intimate. So when we in the news industry send news to mobile we send it to a very personal sphere,» he said.

Some of the insights Ho shared from his work (in the US):

• Mobile is now, not the future. If you’re not already embracing it, you’re behind.

• Mobile is social and social is mobile. The vast majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile.

• We see a major shift to mobile. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 news websites had more traffic from mobile than from desktop. The vast majority of data traffic on mobile comes via apps, not the web.

• Mobile news users skip home pages and arrive sideways. One place desktop is still holding on: At work, at the office, a place where people still go to frontpages.

• Tech companies focus on platforms and app-to-app «deep linking». We also need to think about how apps talk to other apps and go directly from one app to another with no website inbetween

• Mobile news sites tend to be high traffic, low engagement. People read one story then leave.

• Apps are different: Lower traffic but very high engagement, people who use apps stay. The time is what’s important on mobile.

• Mobile is a battle for time. So the challenge is how do you get people to stay.

• Tech is becoming personal, contextual, aware of behaviour, habits and location. It anticipates you.

• Interfaces are evolving beyond screens to focus on voice and gesture control.

• WSJ launched a new responsive news site this year that a lot of work went into. Having a responsive website is a must, a minimum to survive in this mobile world right now.

• Advertising doesn’t work as well on mobile for most people. Native ads are definitely the trend, definitely working better than traditional banner ads, but advertising is work in progress on mobile.

• If your content is good enough people are willing to pay for news on mobile, but it has to be unique. Subscriptions are a major part of WSJ’s strategy – but a lot of the news provider's content is stuff people rely on for their work.

Ho also shared his 50 favourite apps for journalists in 30 Minutes, and has later shared those slides on Twitter:  Journalism Apps slide 1, Journalism Apps slide 2, Journalism Apps slide 3 & Flappy bird lessons for news.

 

 

Rule no 1: Do Not Annoy. Interesting talk on #mobilejournalism & #responsivedesign by David Ho from @wsj, courtesy of @instituttforjournalistikk #ijkurs #mobileJ #journalistikk #Oslo

A photo posted by Kristine Lowe (@kristinelowe1) on Aug 19, 2015 at 1:34am PDT

The end of Mecom

War, controversy, public outcry, murder: Now that Belgium’s De Persgroep is set to buy the remains of what was once Monty’s Mecom a very coulourful chapter of European media history is about to end.

Danish employees are, understandably, reported to be relieved, now that the very drawn-out sales process finally seems to be coming to an end and Dutch competition authorities have given the  all clear for Belgian family-owned media company De Persgroep to go ahead with its acquistion of the remains of Mecom, comprised of the Danish media group Berlingske and the Dutch media group Wegener.

However, even though much has been made of the fact that De Persgroep, being family-owned, is a much more "palatable" proprietor than former Mecom-boss David Montgomery (with his reputation as a "consistent cold-blooded cost-cutter")  Villamedia.nl reported a few months back that De Persgroep's rein will start with cost-cuts (though these might primarily affect the Dutch operations where there would be major synergies between Wegener and De Persgroep's existing operations).

As for Mecom's colourful history, that's perhaps worth revisiting later: but it's fascinating to think about how much has happened these last eight media years...

The year of post-it-notes and mindfulness

For a nethead and digerati like myself, 2014 was a year of ironies.

For one, if I was to name the go-to-tool that played the most pivotal role for me at work last year, it has to be post-it-notes -  and then there was that whole mindfulness business.

I guess it’s a occupational injury of sorts that I often (mostly for fun) sum up my personal year in a headline akin to how I used to sum up media or technology years when that was my professional beat.

But most of the time I think I refrained from publising those more personal headlines, though they often corresponded with the work I was doing. E.g. I think I dubbed my 2011 the year of iPad and anti-social sharing because the device became so key to my work and life that year and yet I found my social media use to have become rather anti-social compared to what it had been before because I did most of the sharing via apps like Flipboard and Hootsuite – which created very a different, much less social, communication mode for me in a busy worklife.

And last year, I sort of re-discovered and came to lean heavily on post-it-notes - of all things.

I spent (and spend) a substantial amount of my working hours structuring and re-thinking the sub pages of a university web site, including all its research, by way of mapping the content and content desires of the various departments. And post-it-notes happened to be the perfect tool for doing it. Especially for workshops where the attendees are working in groups, but also when I was/am working on my own.

I did check out a few online tools that could be used for the job, but especially when working in groups I found post-it-notes to be an easy, flexible and useful option.

Besides, over the last few years I’ve found more and more that for certain uses I prefer pen and paper to digital tools because the former give me a very visceral feeling of thinking with my fingers.

So much so that I think my first "work related" purchase this year might be a flip-over for my home (which obviously will come out of my own pocket).

I’ll readily admit that this sense of sometimes "thinking better" when working with pen and paper is an intuitive feeling, but this experience is actually supported by science: Scientist have found that writing by hand does strengthen the learning process, among other things.

But it’s definently not, at least for me, all kind of learning and thinking that is best done by hand – very far from.

I strongly prefer writing blog posts, articles and most other such things, in fact doing most of my writing, on a computer connected to the internet. But I find that when structuring large amounts of information, like when working on the architecture of a big web site or writing a book, pen and paper can come in really, really handy in certain stages of the project.

Until I find less intrusive solutions than FitBit and Moves, I shall also do most of my lifelogging in a good old fashioned notebook (I do of course fancy a smart watch, but rationally I know it will drive around the bend unless I can find one that runs on what Amber Case calls calm technology) .

Talking about life logging, I’ve also worked hard to turn my life around / change my lifestyle in 2014. That’s were that mindfulness business comes in. Now a lot of people will tell you how delightful and calming and all kinds of wonderful taking up meditation or another form of mindfulness practice is, but I must admit I’ve rarely felt more anxiety and pain than for the first year or so of getting into this stuff.

Though the emphasis is on "felt". Turns out I’ve been what therapists call "frozen" (probably since the accident I was in 20 years ago) and not really in touch with all my feelings etc. That’s part of what has enabled me to come through so much adversity and work such crazy hours for much of my life.

And getting in touch with all that stuff again, becoming more mindful if you like, was hardly frictionless: I honestly had no idea I had so much anxiety or so many (mostly minor) physical pains.

I did and do benefit from mindfulness training and meditation, I’ve found some very useful tools in it, but I also think it perfectly sensible of whichever part of me who acted to want to be "unmindful" for long periods of my life (I’ve written more on stuff related to this process in Norwegian here).

So: Onwards. For me, the year of post-it-notes and mindfulness has definently meant progress. That may sound counterintuitive, but essentially the year has made me a more balanced person - or a better version of myself. 

 

The last edition of The Journalist

This Friday the very last edition of The Journalist’s 98 year old print magazine was published, thereby ending a chapter in Norwegian press history.

Due to the general decline in media advertisement and an increasingly difficult financial situation, the trade journal for Norwegian journalists, owned by the Norwegian Journalist Union, will cease to exit and the news organisation Journalisten BA will stop operating as an independent organisation and become a division of the union. The website journalisten.no will keep on covering the media industry, but with a reduced staff after two of its full-time and one of its part-time journalists have accepted redundancy deals. This leaves the website with an editorial staff of three full-time journalists and one writing editor.

The Journalist is the last of two Norwegian media magazines throwing in the towel, with media and marketing magazine Kampanje publishing its last edition in November after 50 years of publishing.

The Jounalist is a former employer of mine (and Kampanje a former client), and though I’m not sad, it just makes me feel nostalgic, to see the print magazine go, I am very sad to see The Journalist’s staff reduced and its independent status diminished.

The last edition of the Journalist to be printed, and to have its pages displayed on that office wall pictured:

Obituary in the last print edition of The Journalist by Drupal developers Ramsalt (journalisten.no runs on Drupal and is a client of Ramsalt):

Is 2014 the year of Buzzfeed copycats?

In Scandinavia, one of this year’s most talked about and controversial media «innovations» has been the surge in new sites copying key aspects of Buzzfeed’s self-dubbed «art of social publishing».

This week Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting piece on how this trend, traditional newspaper companies starting competing Buzzfeed imitators, has been playing out in Sweden. But the same is true for Norway, and on a smaller scale Denmark – though the players differ.

In Norway, the media market I know best, Amedia-owned regional newspaper Nordlys has been leading the pack with the launch of Buzzit.no in June – followed by NHST Media Group-owned financial daily DN.no’s Bisbuzz.no and Egmont’s Superlike. In Denmark we’ve seen sites like Egmont’s tickl.dk / superlike.dk.

Why? According to Anders Opdahl, Buzzit-boss and editor-in-chief of Nordlys, «Desperate times breeds desperate measures».

At a meeting of the Norwegian Online News Association (NONA), which I’ve blogged about in Norwegian here and Kampanje has written a good summary of here, he explained:

“The backdrop for the Buzzit launch was, to be completely honest, the dramatic fall in print revenues. We were not able to fit skilled digital employees into the budget for 2015. We had to cut costs and do this based on the seniority principle, and we could not defend keeping these young people. Incidentally, this happened just when the New York Times Innovation report was leaked - on BuzzFeed.”

So Buzzit.no was launched as a new, separate organisation and site with the intention of trying out a new form of distribution for journalism. The site has a staff of six: five journalists working shifts and one business developer.

Opdahl said the current focus of the site is on building position and distribution, though it is a long-term ambition to be able to also do investigative journalism once the site has built enough traffic. Like Buzzfeed, Buzzit is primarily a mobile site, not a desktop site - very little of the site’s traffic comes from desktop. When Buzzit started out, a lot of its content was stories taken from Amedia’s many regional newspapers and subbed or “optimised” for social media.

A key aspect of the site’s ambition is about understanding how social media works: How does one maximize organic proliferation, what role does segmentation and fragmentation play?

And though the site has been far from immune to controversies similar to those affecting Buzzfeed, with  accusations of plagiarism, copy theft etc, it has obviously not stopped other Norwegian media companies from launching similar sites.  

I must admit I feel a bit depressed to see these sites lauded as major new media innovations, or to suggest, as I do in the title, that this media year could be dubbed the year of Buzzfeed copycats. But two points made towards the end of the above-mentioned NONA-meeting, bears repeating here:

«These sites have innovated the distribution model in a way many can learn from, but it is not a good thing for everyone to copy it for that reason. What we really need is innovation on the business- and revenue side of the media industry, where there really is a crisis. This “social publishing innovation” is a microscopic innovation and microscopic progress,” said Arne Krumsvik, a former media executive turned media academic (and my comrade-in-arms building NONA in its early days).

«In the same way that Buzzit is moving towards more traditional formats, the more traditional media is moving towards Buzzit. Social media skills must be increased, social media is important in the same way as newspaper distribution used to be important before,» said media columnist Sven Egil Omdal.

Buzzit.no (screengrab):

Update 15.02.2015: Schibsted-owned VG joined the fray and launched Tldr.no a few days after this post was written. More about the launch here (in Norwegian)

Get your users hooked: How to design addictive products and services

Negative emotions are the most powerful inner trigger for habit-forming actions: «When we're depressed we go to Facebook. When we’re bored we go to YouTube. When we’re stuck, we Google it – these are all responses to internal triggers.»

So, how can we design for it?

The sentiment above belongs to behaviour design consultant and author Nir Eyal, who opened the show at this year’s Webdagene, an annual Norwegian web conference organised by Norwegian UX-company Netlife Research.

In his talk, Eyal went on to to provide a step-by-step guide to how to design what he calls «habit-forming products» (addictive is my term) – such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

At the start of the conference I instinctively started taking copious notes, but then I had to remind myself I was there to listen, as a paying member of the audience, not to report, and I promised myself to only blog about what really stuck, what really stood out for me after the conference was over (I've blogged more about the conference here, in Norwegian).

And Eyal's talk certainly gave me lots of food for thought.

During the talk he quoted Ian Bogust that «our technology is quite possible becoming the cigarettes of our time», admitting that designing habit-forming products is a form of manipulation, but saying we should use the psychological insights that allow us to create habit-forming design as a force for good.

You can check out the highlights from his talk on Slideshare here  or see his talk on video here.

At the start of the talk, I must admit I found myself wondering how far we’ve travelled from the days of Cluetrain (when social media very much were portrayed as tools for democracy, creating a new more democratic public sphere), to Gluetrain (an excellent parody on Cluetrain) to social media as some kind of addiction machines.

Was that development inevitable? Describing Eyal's book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Forbes writes:

«Making products habit-forming, and the behaviour design that makes it possible, has gone from being a nice-to-have to a need-to-have in the ultra-competitive world of apps and digital services. There are so many things screaming for users’ attention that only the things that they whisper to themselves about have a chance of sticking around for a while.»

Malmö, Limhamn, police violence and Facebook: How news find you anno 2014

I’ve been pondering how news find us anno 2014 for a while and will blog more in-depth about this later, but I just had a very interesting experience which illustrates how things are changing:

So, I catch up on the news stream from my friends on Facebook early in the morning, as I often do. I see an American friend who lives in Malmö, Sweden, but currently is vacationing in Portugal ask what this story on violence and Nazis in Limhamn, Malmö, filling up his FB-news feed is about, asking his friends to fill him in (which they do).

This makes me visit Vg.no and Nrk.no, the Norwegian news sites I think of as being the most likely places to be quick to cover breaking news.

Yet I find nothing, so I go back to reading Facebook – and lo and behold, a story on the demonstration and police violence in Limhamn finds me.

Published by Aftenposten.no, which wouldn’t normally be the first place I’d look for breaking news as I’ve sort of got Aftenposten.no down as better on analysis and in-depth stuff than on breaking news.     

So maybe things are changing at Aftenposten.no  also, as the news comapany recently (end of last year) nicked its top boss from Vg.no.

In either case, an anecdote which will inspire more thought.

It must be said though, that it might have read very differently had I been working in news (which I currently don’t), and had I not run out of coffee, which I had this morning, my first point of call might have been Swedish rather than Norwegian news sites.

In other words: Better go get some coffee.

On coming full circle

"You know, we really prefer to talk to people who’ve come full circle," a magazine journalist who interviewed me last summer told me (or something to the tune of this).

The story still made the cover of the magazine in question in September, but  at the time I had by no means come full circle, and have been pondering that concept at regular intervals ever since.

Do we ever come full circle, as in "arrive"  or "completely reverse your original position" while still alive? It seems to me that whenever I feel like I’ve come full circle in relation to one phase another phase starts – and more often than not they overlap and run parallel each other for a while.

At the time of the interview,  I’d just completed a stay at Sunnaas rehabilitation hospital, Norway’s largest specialised hospital in the field of medical rehabilitation, about 20 years too late.

A stay which took place less than two weeks after I’d moderated the keynote session at the annual conference of The Norwegian Online News Association, the organisation I co-founded and headed for several years.

This to me, felt full of contrasts and emblematic of my conflicting identities - or perhaps they’re just slightly conflicting to me. Because, as a former school-friend reminded me, I’m also the girl whose dog saved her life. I’ve used that phrase before, but it sums up so much – especially the gap in how people who know me from different parts of my life see me.

And this year (since last June/July) has really belonged to the girl whose dog saved her life. Not the commentator, journalist, blogger, science communicator or any of the professional identities I have held or hold (despite all the hours I’ve put in at work this year).

Sunnaas was a major turning point for me: At the time, it was perhaps the scariest, and probably the best thing I’d done in a long time. 

The Saturday before I left for Sunnaas, I had been photo copying parts of the documentation from the worst period in my life: 41 pages about the time immediately after my dog ​​saved me from certain death after I, as a  pedestrian, was hit by a car and left for dead: unconscious and in a critical condition - and of the gloomy forecasts the hospital doctors gave me when I started regaining consciousness at the hospital some time (about a week or so) later.

Those gloomy forecasts, which I interpreted as my life as I knew it being over at 17, have haunted me ever since, and I’ve spent most of my life since in a state of constant emergency, trying to prove those doctors wrong.

So confronting all of this, which I’d in some respects so effectively run away from for so many years, was very scary and challenging, but ultimately very rewarding. Because the doctors were wrong back then, 21 years ago. The thorough medical and neuropsychological examination at Sunnaas proved I’ve recovered and coped magnificently.

Except for some of my coping, or survival, strategies, that is.

Some of those, such as living in a constant state of emergency (which could also be dubbed stress addiction), are not so sustainable (to say the least).

So, even though the stay at Sunnaas lifted something big, heavy and soul-destroying from my shoulders, and the examination results were good, it only heralded the start of a lot of hard work. It definitely did not herald the end  of struggles - as Sunnaas provided me with a big to-do list regarding how to change my life (or those survival strategies which dominated it) around.

And even though I got top scores on my progress with that to-do list after my control stay at Sunnaas in February (I always work  hard at the things I dedicate myself to), that was not the end of that chapter either. Neither was any of the hard work I, and even my family,  put in the months since. Although I feel I’ve come a very long way,  I cannot say that I’ve come full circle even though some of the hardest work is done.

Being a journalist myself I do understand the quest, or desire for a story with a clear beginning and a clear end, and the appeal of a story about some sort of final victory or of coming full circle. Except that feeling of final victory in the story of my life keeps evading me, as does the clear beginning and end of various chapters.

"In the media we like black and white stories with obvious heroes and villains a cartoon-like script treatment of the issues ," my friend Tom Burroughes once said. And then there’s life: messy, complex and often non-linear (at least in terms of challenges and life lessons).

Actually, the best journalists do come close to describing it, and sometimes do manage to describe it perfectly, but it’s not run of the mill.

Neither, I suspect, are those necessarily the stories we would prefer to read if we’re honest. I know I at least would prefer for dramas to have clear and achievable solutions, and happy and finite endings. I’d prefer wars to end, policy struggles to be resolved successfully and for all people to beat their personal demons once and for all.

Likewise, I would like to be able to say that I’ve now finally and once and for all got rid of all the negative aspects of those deeply ingrained survival strategies and come full circle.

Instead, If I’m truthful , I’ve probably just come a bit further along the road less travelled…

NB: No new age meaning implied when I use that term, "the road less travelled". However, it is often said that the brain pathways of our habitual thinking and reactions easily can become "superhighways to hell", whereas changing habits is a bit like breaking new ground/creating new brain pathways that, at least to start off with, are narrow and cumbersome to walk. The allegory mentioned in Matthew 7:13-14, about the narrow vs the wide gate, springs to mind, even though I’m not religious.

Tyepad DDoS-attack: change of design, no change of heart

Finally picking up blogging here again, after a six month hiatus, regular readers might notice my blog has a new design (if you’re not all reading this blog via RSS-feed only).

The reason? April’s DDoS-attack on Typepad, which, as I wrote on Facebook was "a really interesting story - worth at least a blog post if not my blog was down".

On a superficial level, it prompted me to change my blog template as my former design template looked really weird, loading sidebars before main content, in the periods when Typepad was struggling to keep its blogs online/ starting to bring the blogs back online.

 But the DDoS-attack was of course interesting for several more profound reasons:

 1) On a macro level: if it had been Facebook an not Typepad suffering about a week of downtime it would have been on the front page of (all?) national newspapers. The way people talked about the downtime was indicative of both a) Typepad's dwindling influence & b) its decent customer service - the impressive amount of good will expressed by frustrated users=impressive)  

2) Have we truly come to this? Attempts at ransoming (almost-)major internet services with a DDoS-Attack?

3) On a micro level: this would have completely ruined my weekend six years ago, when I guess I was fairly addicted to blogging. As it happened, the DDoS-attack meant I finally got around to cleaning down that gas grill I've recently inherited and doing all sorts of other practical things.

You see, I had been planning to finally pick up blogging here again that weekend, it was Easter I believe, and a welcome holiday from a demanding life (work and stuff).  

Life’s demanded every little morsel of energy I could muster recently, involving a job I love and some other stuff which I might get around to blogging about eventually, so I’ve ended up being a somewhat passive consumer of social media as a result of it – using social media to relax (reading, surfing, listening) rather than contributing all that much myself.

So I was longing for some proper blogging time again, and Easter seemed to provide it – if only my blog hadn’t been down.

Sort of. That’s not entirely true as I do have a Norwegian Wordpress blog I could have used, where I mainly blog about more personal stuff, but the DDoS-attack on Typepad put me sufficiently off blogging that I got around to cleaning down that gas grill instead (while keeping a watch on the DDoS-attack via Twitter. So, I’m not entirely cured of  that slightly obsessive interest in blogging and all things internet-related, but my approach to social media seems to move in phases – a bit like life and my approach to other things).    

In fact, blogging seems a hard habit to break. During those weeks and months of non-blogging, I found myself mental blogging a lot – writing sketches for blog posts in my mind whenever I came across things I felt like, but didn’t find time to, blog about .

So this summer I’m hoping to do a bit of back blogging  as one of the most useful uses of my blog for me has always been as a backup brain /backup of my own mind, which, in light of the recent DDoS-attack, really should prompt me to find a way of creating a back up of my blog.

Especially since I’ve also been told that Typepad has messed up the coding of its blogs in a way which makes it really cumbersome and time-consuming to move a Typepad-blog (as opposed to e.g. a Wordpress-blog to a new blogging platform).  So any ideas on this, efficient ways to back up my blog, are very welcome.  

#backblogging