Kristine Lowe

How to (not) pitch a blogger

Just as I was putting together that post on Blondinbella and product placement, I came across Natalie's wonderful Blogging 101 for Publicists: an excellent tutorial in blogger relations for PRs from my favourite mixologist (who as far as I know blog for ... eh.. love and public spirit)

I know I've complained about some of the silly PR approaches I get as blogger in the past, and even linked
up some useful advice
on how not to go about it, but Natalie offers nothing less than her "PSA for the other remaining few PR professionals who seem to have missed the memo explaining what a blog is and how it works," and generously says "Go on, drink up… this one’s on me". A few headlines:

Lession #4: The blogger has the final say.
Think of a blog as a publication. Now, realize that the blogger is the Senior Editor, Publisher and Art Director, rolled into one.

The clincher in the offensive email was this person’s feeling that she was doing me a favor, rather than realizing that it is, in fact, the other way around. This condescending line stuck like a bone in my throat:

“I treat you like a journalist, and thus expected a rapport like what I have with serious journalists.”

Umm... considering my bylines appear in national and regional print and online publications, most actually consider me a journalist, thank you very much. It would be appropriate to “treat me” as such. I was also a bit insulted – on behalf of myself and other bloggers – at the implication that bloggers are somehow lowlier than journalists, and not to be taken as seriously. Ironically, most bloggers I know are far more informed about a specific topic than the majority “staff writers.” And, believe me when I tell you that many of those “serious journalists” rip-off content from our blogs, on a regular basis, because we have become the experts in our niches.

Lesson #5: Understand the difference between a blog post and a magazine article.
Being a professional writer includes having the skill to change writing style, tone - and even the rules - when writing for any particular outlet. My blog "voice" is completely different from my magazine articles. I use the “first person,” spout my opinions and am influenced by my own biases. Its a free-form arena. I write exactly the way I want to, when I want to, about what I want to. If you like my style, pitch me your clients. If you don’t, there are a whole slew of other cocktail bloggers out there. Have at ‘em. Or, better yet, forget the Internet and stick with print.

Lesson #6: Become acquainted with what I call “the power of the blog.”
You see, back in 2005, when I held my final “salary job,” I was a restaurant publicist. Our PR firm had begun pitching food bloggers. At the time, I didn’t totally get what a blog was – but I knew it tapped into a valuable demographic many print publications didn’t reach. When I finally “hopped the fence” to write full time, in January 2006, the first thing I did was launch The Liquid Muse where I blogged, daily, because I had become so passionate about spirits, wine and cocktails. I took a 100% pay cut. Even today, my blog is a labor of love. The fact that thousands of people, every month, stop by to get their cocktail updates at The Liquid Muse is of huge personal satisfaction to me, and provides a valuable service to both the liquor companies and the readers, if I do say so myself. And, my readers know I’m not stifled by editors, publicists or advertisers. This is the power of the blog.

Lesson #7: Print is dying. Be nice to bloggers... Go check out the full post here.

Blondinbella's brand of blog profit

How could I possible think I could get away with mentioning 'product placement' in the same line as blog and think I could avoid revisiting that age old debate surrounding it?

I couldn't of course, but this is all down to me as I haphazardly talked about two different 'blog profit models' in one and the same post without making a clear distinction between the two. Hence Charlie Beckett asked me to clarify, and I'll do my best to oblige.

The other day I blogged about how Swedish media seems to be waking up to the profit to be made from niche blogs. The business model here is simply to get top niche bloggers to blog on your platform so you can benefit from their in-depth coverage of a particular issue, the traffic their dedicated readers brings and offer your advertisers very specific, and often very attractive, target groups (you know: 17–22-year-old fashonistas, 25-30-year-old fashionistas, political geeks, hip hop geeks etc etc). I've written more about this trend here and here.

Now, at the end of that post, I happened to mention how one clothing chain found Blondinbella (aka Isabella Löwengrip), one of Sweden's most read bloggers, especially useful in its marketing strategy. However, Blondinbella's business model is not only based on selling advertisement space, but also on being paid to write about products.

In an interview with Stockholm City, she explained that despite receiving products and being paid to write about them, she didn't feel she was deceiving her readers as she felt she would have bought these products even if she wasn't paid to promote them. To Dagens Media, she said:

"When a company contacts me we write a contract about how many times I will write about the company on my blog, and if I will say something about it on TV if given the chance, or when I'm interviewed by newspapers and magazines."

In other words, not dissimilar to the kind of deals some celebrities strike with cosmetic companies, nutrition companies etc, and certainly a kind of setup that some may find ethically challenging.

For my own part, I can only say that I'm not really in Blondinbella's target group (I mean when I was her age, I was mostly wearing black, hanging out in the local press club discussing philosophy; these days I'm mostly wearing black, hanging out online discussing the philosophical aspects of media trends), so it's not a blog I'd normally read other than out of curiosity.

In general though, I tend to see the internet a bit like a virtual pub or coffee bar, and just as I'd distrust, and quickly loose interest in, anyone who'd walk into a real life pub or coffee bar and start talking about products they'd been paid to promote, I don't see that I'd treat this much different online (but it always helps that advertisment is clearly signposted, if nothing else so you can stay clear of it, and Isabella is quite open about her business model) ...

Your grandchild: "Did people just sit there?"

I have to confess that I've shamelessly ripped the headline of this post, as well as the first quote, from a post on NRKbeta, but it all serves a larger purpose.

You see, NRKbeta brought my attention to this thought-provoking quote from an article by Douglas Adams, which, when I read it, was a bit like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place, as I've been thinking quite a bit about how people use social media, and how the way they use it defines their understanding of it recently. I'll return to those thoughts later, but, first, here's Adams:

During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.”

“What was the Restoration again, please, miss?”

“The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”

Which brings me to a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto (2000), to my mind, the book that best describes how the (social) web has changed business as usual.

In fact, if we are to imagine how the world may look like a decade or two into the future, I think this might be the book professors in intellectual history will use to introduce their students to how the interactive web, or social media, changed people's mentality, the way they communicated, what they came to expect of the world etc. (that is, if the age of mass media isn't treated as just an insignificant aberration as Adams suggests):

In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose on it. Millions have flocked to the net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user-friendly – it wasn't – but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life.

In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenised broadcast media, sterilised mass 'culture', and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organisations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Though corporations insists on seeing it as one, the new marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic.

Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy – and free rein – to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge...

...or simply to communicate, as Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman's 'The history of digital community, in less than 7 minutes' (via Sambrook) so aptly shows we've been doing 'literally from the moment people started connecting computers to one another':

Swedish MSM waking up to the profits to be made from blogging

'Waking up' might be a bit of understatement, but there seems to be a steady stream of news from Sweden about mainstream media acquiring blogs to reach attractive niche audiences and advertisers.

A week back, news broke that magazine publisher Egmont was acquiring the male fashion blog Manolo.se, expecting to benefit both from the traffic the blog's roughly 20,000 unique visitors (UV)would bring and the attractive advertising niche it represents. Manolo AB, which is the creation of the guys behind Good Old Trend, recorded about £60K in revenues from September 2005 to December 2006.

Meanwhile, Dagens Media reports that Stureplan.se has lost about 20 per cent of its traffic since blogger Katrin Schulman took her blog to its competitior, Sthlmsfinest.com, while the latter has gained some 35,000 – 45,000 new readers since Katrin started blogging for them. Impressive, but still some way to go to the 120, 000 UV she promised.

Part of a bigger trend?
Update 16/5: However, Swedish mainstream media acquiring blogs is nothing new: those who've followed my blog for a while will know that Swedish TV4 acquired Politikerbloggen.se for about £75,000 June 2007, a price the UK's Guido Fawkes ridiculed as much below what he'd even consider in the comment field.

Admittedly, Politikerbloggen was thought up by a journalist, but there's an interesting trend taking shape here, also in the way Swedish sites like Stureplan.se and Sthlmsfinest.com seem to have crafted their business models on enlisting bloggers to attract certain niche audiences with strong appeal to attractive advertisers.

Blog coverage good for business
Looking at the advertisement side of this, clothing chain Lindex recently singled out Blondinbella and blogs at Modefeber.se as influential for its products.

"When it comes to our webshop we see that the bloggers have a very big effect. We see that products the bloggers write about sell out extremely quick," Sara Carlsson, head of information at Lindex, told Dagens Media.

Of course, this type of scenario brings to mind that old debate about product placement etc, but that's a debate for another time...

Here, there and back again

At some point I feared a re-run of my trip to Costa Rica in 99, when my luggage never got to San Jose with me, and I, for lack of anything better to wear, ended up donning the hotel bed sheets to a VIP reception.

But then I thought: at least I did get there. I did get to Bergen on my second attempt, and miraculously, to my relief, my luggage also managed to get there with me.

Now, I had never been in Bergen before, so I was quite excited about the prospect when I got up in the wee hours to catch the 07:15 plane there to cover the Editor's Association Spring Meeting and the Nordic Media Days on Wednesday last week.

A few Bergen-bound flights were kept on ground that morning due to fog on the West Coast of Norway, but our ballsy pilot gambled that it would all have cleared by the time we reached Bergen. Gambled - and lost. My first flight to Bergen was spectacularly unsuccessful and was forced to return to Oslo after circling over Bergen for about half an hour. That was the opening session.

And when I finally managed to retrieve my luggage there was a planeload of passengers from Warsaw waiting in the ticket queue to rebook their tickets before me. Luckily, I'm scarily good at throwing a civilised tantrum when forced to. I rarely loose my temper, and quickly found someone to convince of my VIP status who let me jump the queue and secure the last seat on the delayed 10:30 flight to Bergen (all bullocks of course, I'm not a VIP, but I needed to get to Bergen as it was the only way we had of covering the events that day).

Come to think of it, that VIP-business only works in the languages I master: it failed spectacularly in Costa Rica, where I finally did end up loosing my temper – to no effect, as the Spanish airport officers didn't get half of my English swear words – and I had to bring a Spanish editor friend to the airport the next day just to make myself understood (that took us as far as a middle manager's office, but my luggage didn't arrive until ten days later, just in time for my return trip).

(Charles lent his moral support. Early days
of digital cameras, hence the grainy quality)

It annoys me tremendously that it has to be this way: why isn't "you lost my luggage" or "you didn't get me where you promised me" enough, why all these games to get what you paid for in the first place?

Ah well, back to Bergen. I finally checked in to my hotel about 3:30pm, just in time for the editor's shrink session (some famous shrink talking about working together as a team), but decided that, for me, the bath tub would be more therapeutic and help ease my mind so as to be better prepared to cover the price ceremony in the evening.

However, I'm ashamed to admit that despite having two cameras in my bag, I somehow managed to come back to Oslo almost exclusively with pictures of men in suits, the notable exception being journalist Helle Aarnes, from Bergens Tidende. Aarnes scooped up the "Journalist of the year" prize for her series of articles on the Norwegian women who were stigmatised for decades after being romantically involved with German soldiers during the second world war.

For my return trip, I simply couldn't make myself catch that 9pm flight back to Oslo on Friday. Nackered from running around photographing men in suits and getting intimately acquainted with all the conference rooms at Grieg Hallen conference hall, I just had to catch a few hours of the Bergen sun and soak in the scenery while I had the chance.

So I opted for taking the train back the following day, which was a brilliant choice, perhaps not for my wallet, but certainly from all other aspects: hours of spectacular scenery and a very civilised restaurant section with leather sofas and panoramic windows.

It was also fascinating to see how the landscape changed as we journeyed from the Bergen and the West Coast, through the mountains to Oslo: from the sharp, jagged, dramatic landscape of the West, to the gently rolling hills of the East - growing ever more soft and rounded the further East we went. It made me think of Montesquieu's (and Aristotle's for that matter) thoughts on how the landscape and climate shape its inhabitants, which is a rather deterministic notion, I know, but not entirely far-fetched in my experience – in either case, that's the topic for another post....

No shame in being compared to an undertaker, says newspaper executive

The debate about the death of printed newspapers was given a somewhat new slant this week with the candid comments of the newly appointed managing director of Norway's biggest newspaper.

During the Nordic Media Days in Bergen, one panelist said Torry Pedersen, editor-in-chief of Schibsted-owned VG.no, the most-read newspaper and news site in Norway, had now become a funeral agent in his new additional capacity as managing director of VG's print edition. Pedersen, though, was not affronted by the comment:

"This is probably not such a bad thing because funeral agencies have the best business model there is; they never become redundant. If we get to a stage where we cannot become redundant, we have done a good job," said Pedersen, adding that since he had now become an old man, the job of keeping VG's ageing print readers reading the paper was well suited for him.

Pedersen will serve as both editor-in-chief of VG.no, a news site with a staggering profit margin of 42 - 45 per cent for the last three years, and managing director the VG the printed tabloid, which, in the same period, has seen much more modest profits combined with rapidly declining circulation figures, until a replacement is found for him at VG.no

The comment fell a day before Schibsted presented record digital revenues

Torry Pedersen (left), not at all unhappy to be
called a funeral agent (my picture)

Old dogs and new tricks (or what really happened to last year's editors' blog)

About this time last year I had great fun putting together a team of media bloggers who live blogged the Norwegian Editor's Association's annual conference which was headlined "Editor 2.0" (on commission from that very same organisation).

While writing this, I'm just about to fly out to Bergen where, among other things, this year's annual conference will kick off soon - but the blog we had so much fun with last year has largely been abandoned: after we started the conversation for last year's conference, the blog has not been updated and editor 2.0 is no longer a theme. I might drop by this year's spring conference as a journalist, but I thought maybe it's about time to put up something like this cartoon (via Sambrook) to explain the silence on the editors' blog, www.redaktorene.no:

How free is the internet?

Government efforts to censor the web are on the rise, but filtering the web tend to be inefficient, and lightweight technological solutions, which makes web-surveillance more difficult, are also on the rise. That, in essence, was the conclusion(s) I took away from a very interesting full-day seminar on this issue yesterday. Espen Andersen live blogged parts of the show here, esp. the contributions of Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales and Jonathan Zittrain (of the Berkman Centre, Oxford Uni, OpenNet Initiative etc). Me, I was stuck with a borrowed laptop with limited battery span until today, so just pen, paper and camera for me yesterday...

Static stories and news conversations

'I think we need a new journalistic method. It's not the finished articles with a beginning, middle and end that are interesting to comment on.'

The words belong to Paal Hivand, who during a forum for online journalism I launched for Journalisten last week (link in Norwegian), argued that we have to move towards a more dialogue-based presentation form, and come to accept that the new media reality demands we let go of control, dare to be open, dare to share...

So speaks a journalist turned blogger and social media geek. I've kept meaning to come back to my conversation with Paal, as well as this post by Adam on how static stories need to give way to live news. Their arguments are slightly different, I know, but I think the next stage we should (have been) discuss(ing) is how media can better utilize the social web , and these two arguments touch on different aspects of this. Lots more to say here, but keep running out of time, and wanted to jot it down so at least to remind myself. Here's Adam on finished and live news:

The next mindshift change journalists need to go through is that they no longer have a finished product. The issue is never complete. The feature is never done. The news is always evolving. And this is hard for us old-school hacks. If you were to ask a group of people what words they associate with journalism, I'd lay odds that "deadline" would be in there somewhere. But we're moving into a post-deadline age, when the publishing time is now, and then as soon as you have new information. Or a new conversation. Or a new contribution.

The web is providing us with the tools to move away from static "finished" story pages to ones that evolve and change with the news. And we need to work out how to adapt our journalistic processes with it.

How MSM and Marketers can curry favour with bloggers

Cory Doctorow has 17 excellent tips in Information Week (via Bloggers Blog) on how to get bloggers to write about you – which could be just as useful for news sites.

Now, let me first take a moment to say that I've never understood journalists and editors complaining about parasitic bloggers and how they feed off mainstream media (MSM). To my mind, the world wide web is a conversation, or more precisely a cacophony of small and big conversations, and the day people stop talking about your newspaper that's when you should start getting really worried. Besides, blog buzz = link love = traffic, and I can't see how blog-traffic is less valuable than other traffic.

But back to Doctorow. In short, his advice adds up to "link, link and link some more":

Have a link. Have a permanent link. Have a link for everything. Use real links. Use links that go to pages. Flash sites stink (no way to link direct to specific page, no way to copy), PDFs stink (or, as Greenslade once suggested PDF = Pretty Damn Futile) etc ...Anyway, go read in full, got to run now....

Fined for flirting with Gates

Without doubt my favourite headline last week, but the story behind it was probably not a big hit in the headquarters of Fast Search and Transfer who was served a hefty fine of roughly £100,000 (NOK 1.110.220 kroner) for not informing Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) about Microsoft's bid for the company.

According to OSE, Fast should have disclosed that it was being courted by the IT-Giant by 7 November 2007 at the latest, when the sales negotiations were formalised with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

However, that Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Fast, clearly price sensitive information according to OSE, was not made public until 8 January 2008. Hence the fine, and the headline – which strictly speaking I guess should have been "Fined for flirting with Ballmer." After the acquisition of Fast was completed on Friday, Microsoft's CEO paid a secret visit to Oslo on Saturday to reassure Fast's employees about their future roles in the company. He was greeted by Digi.no and Anders Brenna, who recorded the visit for posterity here.

Detail from picture by Anders Brenna.

Of course, the headline isn't all that great from a SEO-point of view, but that's another matter...

What punctuation mark am I?

Hmm... no time to blog the things I'd like to blog so far today, but couldn't resist this rather silly little personality test I found over at Diary of a wordsmith:

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises. Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!) You excel in: Higher education You get along best with: The Comma

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

How many of the right readers can you offer us, dear?

"So, just how many DINKY unique visitors with a penchant for expensive jewlery do we get by employing you to blog for us?"

If this post on how "Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging" is anything to go by, this sort of sentiment may come to govern many a future job-interview in the media world.

As Philip pointed out in the comments, the post I wrote on the blogger who promised to bring in 120,000 readers for her future employer left a lot to be explored. It was just a tidbit I jotted down really, short on time and all of that. But I finally found time to make a few phone calls, which resulted in this piece. However, it doesn't answer all the questions Philip raised, so here's a bit more context:

When Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, her blog was snapped up by competing site Sthlmsfinest.com, which hopes to gain a substantial traffic increase on the back of the deal.

The interesting story here, to me at least, is how both these sites hire high-profile bloggers to bring in specific audiences which are attractive to advertisers (both are funded by advertisement).

Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of the latter site told me they pay a mix of bloggers to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends – all of which bring in their own niche audiences.

Likewise, Thomas Grabe, the managing editor at competing Stureplan.se, said: "The mix of bloggers is very important to the site. To showcase a blogger or personality you can not have more than max eight blogs. There are perhaps 15 really big bloggers who get paid for blogging in Sweden, six of them originally blogged for us."

Grabe explained that it was Alex Schulman, Karin's husband, who made Stureplan the success it is, and that at one point several of the members of the Schulman family, an influential Swedish family, were writing high-profile blogs – the brother, the mother, the wife and Alex Schulman himself.

"It was a bit like Big Brother, but online. Katrin is very controversial and told people like it was, hence the name of the blog: fuck you right back. The F-word is indeed controversial, but not to the extent of which it is abroad," said Grabe.

Bloggig is about identity, not brand

A blog gives you a chance to build your own identity, which is miles better than brand. It allows for a mix of trivial, serious, thoughtful and sometimes stupid.. just like the human being behind it. That is the authenticity that companies would like to infuse their brands with. Alas, it's like with androids. Close but not quite. And often, not even close...

Afraid I don't have the direct link for this quote, but I'm sure it's something I copied down from Adriana ages ago (I can just hear her voice when I read it:-) ). I came to remember this quote just now, thinking about a question Paal Hivand asked yesterday about how long you can get away with pure marketing and sales on a blog or twitter acoount before readers get fed up. For my own part: my time/attention is precious, and I get fed up straight away if there's nothing in it for me... Just gave up on following BBC News on twitter because they don't provide direct links (in which case follwing them via my news reader would be far superior, but that's too much of a commitment)...

Baugur's exit from newspapers: much ado about everything

Or why the economic woes of "the Nordic hedge fun masquerading as a country" may not have ended Baugur's newspaper adventure.

A week ago, the executives of Nyhedsavisen, the Danish freesheet launched by Baugur-controlled Dagsbrun in 2006, rushed to denounce headlines that the Icelandic group had sold out of the freesheet that famously provoked the Danish freesheet war. It was all much ado about nothing said Svenn Dam, the CEO of 365Media Scandinavia, the Dagsbrun-controlled company that once owned Nyhedsavisen.

Even though Baugur announced in a press release they had sold their media- telecoms and financial assets to Stodir Invest and Styrkur Invest, and stressed they held no shares in the two new groups, Dam insisted it was just a "restructuring". Morten Lund, an early investor in Skype and the current majority owner in Nyhedsavisen, on the other hand, said this was a non-story as Baugur's top man, Jon Asgeir Johannesen, would be chairman of both groups. Danish journalists who were on the receiving end of Baugur's press release said if this was the case, if Lund and Dam were right, then Bagur had a major communication problem.

Complicated? Well, at least this week's news that Baugur is pulling out of its American freesheet BostonNOW, which was shut down with immediate effect on Monday, couldn't be more straightforward. The bigger question is if this spells the end of Baugur/Dagsbrun's newspaper ambitions though. Does it spell the end of the ambitions to export the 'quality freesheet' concept they've been so successful with on Iceland to the rest of the Western world? Well, I'm not so sure.

The current financial crises could of course spell the end for a company as highly geared as Baugur (though, due to its oblique company structure, we don't know exactly how highly geared), in which case freesheets would be the least of Baugur's concerns. But I have to agree with Lund on one or two crucial points, first: these guys (and gals) "have got BIG balls" (to use Lund's words).

And let's be honest: Baugur/Dagsbrun/Nyhedsavsien, at least in my experience, has been a delight to deal with. A recent poll showed Nyhedsavisen had received what perhaps could be described a disproportionally big amount coverage in Danish media since it launched, mostly negative, something Svenn Dam attributed to a media conspiracy against it.

Now me, I wonder if this wasn't due to the fact that these guys are really good for soundbites. Besides, it's been refreshing to see someone invest so much money in an industry so few seem to believe in (even if it did happen to erode the market for paid for newspapers by drastically reducing their ad revenue, another explanation for why the coverage was largely negative).

Which brings me to the second point it's hard not to agree with Lund on, namely how the newspaper game is a very expensive one. It's also a high-risk game in times of economic trouble, as media is a cyclical industry due to its heavy reliance on advertisment revenues.

I'm sorry for rambling nature of my argument here, got to run to an interview in a second, but as a media analyst I talked to yesterday said: 'we've now seen the end of a very optimistic phase where the economy's been going full steam, which means a lot of ambitions new ventures were launched, competition intensified, and we're now moving into a tougher phase which may or may not be a recession.'

This means two things: overtley ambitions new launches crumble and die; or, and I wonder if this is not the case with Baugur, the company behind those launches, finds a way to reduced its exposure to the risk, making sure they could still cash in at some future, more opportune, point in time...

Picture from Morten Lund's blog published when Nyhedsavisen became Denmark's most read newspaper (which it still is)