Kristine Lowe

Lord Rothermere rejected freesheet partnership with Schibsted

While new CEO of pan-European media group Schibsted, Rolv Erik Ryssdal, is hard at work trying to charm the analysts of the world’s financial centres, its now retired CEO, Kjell Aamot, is giving the odd talk closer to home and sharing some fascinating tidbits while he’s at it.

At a recent Norwegian media conference he talked of a partnership he offered Lord Rothermere, the proprietor of Daily Mail and General Trust Plc (DMGT), while sharing a cab with him a few years ago.

- I asked him if he wanted to team up with us to launch a freesheet in France. He declined and said he had no faith in freesheets. If he were to start a freesheet it would be to protect newspapers such as The Evening Standard. In the same cab was a representative for a French media company. He called me later and asked if Schibsted was interested in a partnership, Aamot, told Kampanje.

That was the start of what is now the rather successful freesheet 20 Minutes, which I believe is jockeying with Metro’s French edition for the position as France’s most read newspaper. Aamot said he remembered the conversation with Lord Rothermere vividly in light of how Evening Standard was sold to former KGB-agent Alexander Lebedev earlier this year and last month was turned into a freesheet…

My first meeting with tabloid media and the dog who saved my life

Incidentally, this is the title of an old post I never got around to finishing, but, since I used this story last week for a column I write, I thought I’d finally make an attempt of blogging about it.

Now what got me thinking about this old, and rather personal story, was when Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet ran with a very controversial front page depicting the erratic behaviour of a Norwegian on trial for murder in Congo.A montage of photos of him appearing to be psychotic was accompanied by the title "See How Sick He Is".

Following massive protests about the front page, many of the most vocal ones on micro blogging site Twitter, Dagbladet did apologise for what it dubbed its ”unmusical” coverage, though also ran a story with the Congo-prisoner’s mother saying the media should not stop showing how ill her son was as the most important thing for her was him getting proper help.

Media violations

What readers and commentators seemed to find most disturbing about this front page was how it depicted a man who was clearly mentally ill and should be spared media’s spotlight, accompanied by a title most found to be in very bad taste. However, what I felt was lacking in the debate that followed was how this kind of media ”violation” is not unusual. We saw it after the Tsunami in 2004, after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 and have seen and see it in countless other instances.

Media’s handling of vulnerable people - either in a state of shock, or mentally ill people who provoke, or are caught up in, big news events - is a minefield, and one I am all too familiar with. When I was 17 I was run down by a car while out walking, and left to die next to a deserted forest road. Unconscious, bleeding heavily, face down in the snow and not visible from the road, I would not have been here today if it had not been for my dog getting help, but that’s another story (I’ve touched on it here, a friend has written more here).

Harsh meeting with the tabloid press

When the case came to court, a seemingly stressed reporter showed up and only wanted a quick photo, as it seemed he’d already written the story, at least in his mind. The photo he wanted was of me shaking hands with the guy who ran me down and left me to die, and the headline would be ”I forgive you”.

He never got that photo. Not because I have a burning hatred against the perpetrator, I had no memory of the car accident, still don’t, and everything that happened just seemed surreal to me when the case came to court. But something in me made me refuse, albeit hesitantly. I had to say no several times for the reporter to get the message, but the whole thing was so surreal to me that, looking back, I know, had I been approached differently, I might have accepted the proposition and lived to regret it.

Shock and fear

Today, I can see that I was still in a state of shock. This was quite some time after the accident, I don’t remember the year, but I lost my sense of fear for several years after the accident. When you wake up in a hospital just to be told you almost died in an accident you have no memory of it seems pointless to go around worrying about all the bad things that can happen. It had already happened.

Now, loosing my sense of fear was not entirely a bad thing, against all odds I accomplished a lot career wise in those years, but today I can acknowledge that I either I had a prolonged shock-like reaction to a near-death experience, or I had a slight change of personality.

Not black and white

The reason I’m sharing this story is not to crucify the reporter in question, rather I wanted to illustrate how difficult it can be to judge when a person is in shock or not. There are ethical boundaries it never is acceptable to break - and I would argue that in my case the reporter was trying to manufacture news rather than report it, which I don’t have much sympathy for.

Still, a lot of the time these cases are not black and white, though it is also worth reflecting on how the kind of opportunism the reporter in my case showed, is something often encouraged in reporters - admired even.

The "strong, human angle"

As a reporter you do want to talk with eyewitnesses after events like the Tsunami, or with the victim in court cases ranging from traffic accidents to rape, but they will for obvious reasons be affected by what they’ve experienced, and news values may crash with human concerns. The hunt for a ”strong human angle” may lead reporters to pay too little heed to the state of mind their interview-objects are in, which in this day and age often will cause not only strong reactions from those caught up in the event, but often also a backlash against the media organisation the reporters represents.

I find this last bit both comforting and encouraging: in a world where social media radically lowers the barrier for making your opinion heard, media organisations are frequently held to court for the decisions they make, and sometimes forced to apologise, even when media practitioners all to well understand the rationale for those ”unmusical decisions”.

At the scene of the accident in 1994, almost a year after it happened

Talking of ethics: I shall be attending the Institute of Communication Ethics’ annual conference in Coventry today, followed by a seminar on journalism in crisis at Coventry University. (BTW, this post was written hurriedly on the train with a crap web connection, so not had the time to read thru it properly).

CAR-journalism: Tax day, Facebook-apps and Nosy Neighbours

It’s that day of the year: the tax lists are made public in Norway and the country’s hacks have been up since the wee hours, working hard to provide us with new ways to pry into our neighbours' earnings - and those of the rich, powerful and famous.

The term ”Big brother is watching you” springs to mind; though it is more like a whole army of David’s watching you. Norwegian news sites’ eager work to make the tax lists available means everyone and his dog can check up on how much you earned and taxed the previous year, and it proves an equally big ”click winner” each year.

This year a Facebook application which allows people to check what all their Norwegian Facebook friends earned and taxed last year is raising eyebrows. The application, provided by both the country’s main commercial TV channel, TV2, and the second most read tabloid, Dagbladet, is causing quite some outrage among my Twitter-friends, and a quick search on hashtags like #TV2fail and #skattelister shows they’re not the only ones.

It is possible to block these applications, which I must admit would be my natural inclination, but as a journalist I feel it would send the wrong signal even though I’ve never been a fan of how the tax lists are made available on tax day.

Ironically, it is perhaps the one example of computer assisted reporting (CAR) known to most Norwegians, but several of the CAR-specialists I know are sceptical to the kind of information the tax lists provide us with. They want more details of course, details that would have enabled them to make more useful comparisons that would tell us more about income divides related to geography, class, education etc, not only be a tool for nosy neighbours and envy as it mostly is today - and a rather imprecise tool at that.

Every year the tax lists contain a lot of mistakes, and the numbers can be very misleading because of the way they are presented. As someone who works both as a salaried journalist and as self-employed, I’ve certainly seen again and again that the tax lists tend to miss one of the two types of income. Sometimes the tax lists also contain genuine mistakes, and it’s peculiar how you can read about your tax status on news sites before you get the actual letter from the tax office informing you of it.

If nothing else, this phenomena means Norwegians should have a stronger incentive to keep active social media profiles than most: it’s the best way to control your online identity and make sure the top Google hits on your name are stuff like your blog, your Twitter-, LinkedIn, Facebook profiles etc - and not your tax profile...

I must also admit it does feel good to be on my way to Bergen to host a meeting with Nick Diakopoulos on very different forms of CAR-journalism on a day like this (the talk is an open one, feel free to join us if you are in the vicinity).

Update: many thanks to Andreas for informing me that it is not the first year Facebook-apps such as the one described in this post have been available (in Norwegian).

Screengrabs below from last year's "Tax-day-journalism":

1) Tv2 on Norway's best earning editors, 2) Norway's public broadcaster (NRK) on princess Martha Louise's "heavenly income" from her angel school:

Shield law lunacy

In a world where journalism is in the danger of turning into a hobby, isn't it ironic that the US looks set to get a shield law that excludes non-salaried journalists from protection?

I've been following the slow progress of this potential new law for some time now, and I'm struck by how at odds its definition of who should be allowed to protect their sources is with the changing media landscape. I've previously bemoaned that it will offer no protection for the Dr Stockmanns of this world, but with the very nature of journalism and who committs valuable acts of journalism so much in flux, limiting the scope of this law to only protect salaried journalists seems very strange.

For one, bloggers, and outfits like Huffington Post, are increasingly providing valuable journalism, analysis and even investigations. Come to think of it, that has already been the case for years now, and I recently concluded in an article on blogging the crash (for a new book on the financial crash and the crisis in journalism) that some bloggers even covered the events leading up to the credit crisis better than traditional media.

This blog post over at Mediashift provides a good argument for why bloggers and citizen journalists deserve a shield law. But with the gloomy state of media finances these days, some are even predicting a future where (freelance) journalists will be forced to work for free. I'm not quite that pessimistic, but there is an uncomfortable grain of thruth or two in Charlie Beckett's post on Celibates, Priests or Toffs? The Future of Freelance.

Freesheet predicted Obama's peace prize

The decision to award this year's Nobel Peace Price to Barack Obama took the world by surprise, but it turns ut at least one newspaper was ahead of the game.

Based on the artists booked for the Nobel Peace Price cermony in Oslo 12 December, Metro Sweden, the daily freesheet, predicted the winner to be none other than the American President. The headline in Friday's print edition read: "The artists at the party reveals Barack Obama gets the peace price" (my translation), and the article asserted that come 11:00 CET 9 October Obama would be named this year's winner as all the artistst booked in for the celebration had some form of assocation with Obama (via Journalisten.dk):

Evening Standard not the first "quality free"

News of The Evening Standard going free has been a major trending topic these last few days - both among London's Twitterati and in the Twingly channel I've set up on journalism & media (in beta, password-protected but see screengrab below).

We may speculate whether or not taking it free is a wise decision, but we're not entirely without case stories to compare it to. Standard-owener Alexander Lebedev and his editor, Geordie Greig, are apparently convinced that they can make a virtue of being the first "quality free": they may be that in the UK market, but Baugur-funded Dagsbrun ran "quality freesheets" for years on Iceland and in Denmark, the company's short-lived US-based free, "Boston Now", may also have fallen under that umbrella. I'm most familiar with the readership figures of their Danish start-up, Nyhedsavisen - a start-up which ended well, not in tears, both its competitors and its journalists, and I talked to both, seemed to drink to its demise albeit for different reasons, but at least in a humbling defeat.

The Icelandic-initiated Danish freesheet was at times the most read newspaper in all of Denmark, and its content, which was designed to compete with paid-for quality dailies rather than other freesheets, seemed to be a hit with well-educated women - often the big spenders in a family. At least I recall making a note of how it had a larger per centage of female and well-educated readers than other freesheets, whereas the Danish freesheets in general led to a larger percentage of young people, who wouldn't normally read papers, reading newspapers. I'm only quoting from memory but I'm sure I've written articles on this - though I fear it was for a print-only magazine.

Also, there are major differences between Nyhedavisen and The Evening Standard, the former was started from scratch in August 2006 whereas the latter has long traditions and a well-established audience, but Nyhedsavisen's readership figures certainly suggest there is a market for quality frees even among more affluent groups. Free daily Frettabladid, which Nyhedsavisen was modelled on, is still Iceland's most read newspaper as far as I know, but its business model is based on door-to-door distribution - a fact many felt was a major reason for the model's demise in Denmark. Earlier this year, Wired's Chris Anderson described it as a tale of free gone terribly wrong after Jon Lund asserted it was this model of "double free" which made Nyhedsavisen an unsustainable project in the end (both blog posts worth reading in full).     

Update 05.10.2009: see also Piet Bakker's post questioning the assertion that ES is the first "converted quality".

Could I have my RSS as I take my coffee, please? (or why I missed that Telegraph story)

I take my coffee straight: it's one of those instant fixes I'm rather dependent on having available whenever I need it, which, seeing that I work for clients in very different time zones, can be at any hour of the day or night. I do wish those RSS-feeds I'm interested in was available the same way.

Actually, they might very well be: I could have created something a lot more tailor-made than just using a newsreader (still on Bloglines, though I know I should switch) to subscribe to news- and blog feeds on media/tech/business and keywords, but why won't media companies make it easier to find their stories?

Take The Times for instance: they have a good media editor, but no media feed the last time I checked (a while ago. NB: see update below). Or the fact that The Telegraph published a story on David Oddson last night, but didn't bother tagging it as "media", at least it wasn't in my Telegraph media feed this morning, so I only discovered their article by checking my RSS-feed from Roy Greenslade after I'd published my own post on this (I first found the story on Icelandreview after someone googled Morgunbladid and ended up on my blog , which made me do the same to see what was up - Icelandic media being something I've followed for several years).

Actually, I know how easy it is in some CMSs, like Escenic, to not put a story in all the categories it should be in, and I'm also aware that, with Twitter, many people have moved away from using RSS alltogether. I still use it though, in addition to Twitter, to find stories: I still think RSS is the best way to find stories proactively online and to get a good overview of what's being written - and either my newsreader has a major problem, or media companies mess up their feeds all the time. There was a week+ this summer my subscription threw up no stories from The Media Guardian - like, I actually had to visit the site, there's not many sites I'd do that for, to get updates;-) - and I've also had the same problem with The Telegraph's muddled media section (muddled because they mix media with telecoms, cable and wireless).

Also, I no longer get the Observer's media feed until Monday, or sometimes Tuesday, whereas I used to get it just after midnight on Sundays (back when "web first" was a pioneering idea?). And this whole idea of mixing the feed of Sunday business sections with the rest of the week, as at least the Indy and Observer do, seems very odd to me as Sunday newspapers used to be something entirely different than weekday newspapers: different weekday business sections always carried much of the same stories regardless of the newspaper, so subcribing to them all feels close to redundant, whereas Sundays used to aspire to create their very own mix of background/analysis and stories they had chased up/uncovered themselves.

If that was still the case - and I'm not contesting that it is, but my perspective is muddled by relying on RSS only and me no longer living in London - I'd pay for the Sundays rather than the weekday papers. Mind you, I'm speaking only of the UK here, in places like Norway business news sites, such as Dagens Naeringsliv, have even been known to send their whole car sections into their media section feed.

Now, I know I should probably move on to create my own tailor-made feed via Yahoo Pipes or similar, but in these days, where paid content and the question of how news sites may successfully charge their readers, this strikes me as one thing that I, as and expert reader, might actually be willing to pay for: to get the news in my RSS-reader instantly - my experience with Yahoo Pipes is also that there's often a delay - and "unpolluted": only the real stuff, please (or, as a friend often puts it: why ruin perfectly good coffee with milk and sugar). Many news sites muddle their media feeds with other feeds, I assume to bring up the volume, but I'd much rather have e.g. media and technology as seperate feeds so I can prioritise better.

However, I'm very aware I belong to a minority of readers who these days only matter in the link economy. Also, I appologise if this post has been mired with household slang: it's one of those rants I usually censor myself from writing, but any input on how I should best set up my newsfeed would also be welcome. I'm not as much of a techie as I'd like to be though: I accomplish most things I bend my mind to, but my mind is frequently overstretched on the workday treadmill of incesscant deadlines...   

Update 01.10 16:30 CET: Joanna Geary kindly made sure The Times got a separate RSS-feed for its media section yesterday, and I quite forgot to update this post until now in the rush of everything. It has of course duly been added to my newsreader and to this new Twingly channel on journalism and media (in beta) I've been playing around with (I've started adding some of my favourite  UK and Scandinavian media feeds to it, leave a comment, email me or DM me on Twitter, I'm @KristineLowe, if you want an invite).

Iceland's most hated man appointed newspaper editor

Davíd Oddsson, Iceland's longest serving Prime Minister and until recently head of the Central Bank, has been hired to edit Morgunbladid, the country's newspaper of record.

I wonder if ever there was a better trick for loosing readers quickly. In the name of accuracy, it must be said that I am of course aware that there are many contenders for the title "Icleand's most hated man", but The Times has certainly singled Oddson out as possible number one in this respect. During my reporting trip to Rekjavik in December, Oddson, and then Prime Minister Geir Haarde, seemed to be the protesters' main objects of hatred, as this photo I snapped illustrates:

You'll find more of my photos from Iceland here, published under a CC non-commercial share-alike license, though I worked with an excellent photographer, Haldur Jonasson, while there, who took some top photos of Morgunbladid's offices and of former Morgunbladid editor Ólafur Th. Stephensen, who announced his resignation a week before Oddson was named one of two new editors of the daily paid-for newspaper.

Of course, Morgunbladid used to be controlled by none other than Bjørgolfur Gudmundsson, and its main rival, Frettabladid, by Baugur's Jon Asgeir Johannesson - cross-ownership and close ties between top politicians, businessmen and the media seems to have been the norm rather than the exception in Iceland - but one would have thought that financial meltdown and all that was reevealed in its wake had changed this.

Apparently not. One journalist I talked to likened the country's media to a bad soap opera; it seems we are are up for a whole new set of episodes.

The Icelandic Weather Report has more on the story.

 Source: googling "Morgunbladid" and finding Icelandreview's articles on the story, as linked up in this post, because someone else googled Morgunbladid and ended up on my blog.

"There are no conferences for fax machines"

I loved this wry blog post from The Oxford Social Media Convention by John Kelly, whose blog from his year in Oxford  I really enjoyed. Here's a highlight:

"I think my favorite observation came from Bill Thompson, a BBC tech columnist and all-around digital gadfly. When speaking about his work with computers (as a student at Cambridge in the 1980s), he said that computers weren't all that interesting or exciting to him. They were just what he did. "Social media is not there yet," he said. 'Which is why we can fill a room with 350 people. There are no conferences for fax machines.'

"His comment underscored the relative newness of things such as Twitter and Facebook and how we're still trying to work out how to integrate them into our lives. I don't think there's anything wrong with that--with pausing to reflect--despite the insistence of some new media prophets who think anyone without an iPhone in each hand and a touch screen on each wall is some lesser form of life.....'

Do check out the full post. Now, I'm painfully aware that my own blog has gone very quite as of late: it's been almost a month since my last update, which is a record of sorts for me, but it's all due to some exciting projects I've been working on lately. I'll get back to those soon, but thought this meta-perspective on social media conferences was a good way to break my blog block. Kelly's post, found via an update from Kate Day on Twitter, also reminded me to replace his Oxford blog with his Washington Post blog in my newsreader - which I should have done ages ago.

Kaupthing Bank promotional video: kaupthinking in retrospective

Kaupthing was the poster child for confusing audacity and financial nous with reckless growth and easy credit, says Investoralist on Twitter, and links to this brilliant must-see video.

Blogger Ultimi Barbarorum describes it thus: "Mildly tragic promotional video from Kaupthing Bank, back when Iceland was in the process of leveraging itself into, well, whatever it is now. Forget Lehmans and Bear Stearns, Kaupthing was the real poster child for the debt bubble of the mid Noughties. On Acid."

Problem is, I'd really like to believe this video. I've previously said Icelandic investment group Baugur's newspaper adventure reads like classic tale of hubris and nemesis, but I must admit that when I was younger I always used to think nemesis was rather unfair. In my mind I've archived nemesis as unjust punishment meted out by capricious gods to stop humans or other creatures, like Promotheus, from striving to be more than what they are, for enlightenment etc. But the financial mess on Iceland was very much a man-made mess, no divine retribution involved there. In retrospective, this line from the promo video explains it all: 

Kaupthinking is beyond normal thinking

Newspaper forced to put new subscribers on waiting list

On the face of it this sounds like a truly miraculous story amidst all the current  doom and gloom of the newspaper industry: Danish local Randers Amtsavis is unable to deal with the rush of new subscribers, reports Journalisten.dk.

Almost 2000 new subscribers since mid-July is forcing the paper to meet subscription requests with the following message: "We're sorry, we can't give you the newspaper straight away, but we can put you on a waiting list". However, the comments reveal that these are not really new subscribers, but rather old subscribers who left the paper in droves when it changed from being a morning to evening paper five months ago, and are now returning after the paper swapped back to being a morning newspaper (the move was announced early July and made effective as of 17 August). A remarkable story nonthesame.

In the comment section one reader asks why ever the Randers Amstavis thought it a good idea to become an evening paper, to which the paper's chief-editor replies they are not too boneheaded (my hasty translation of 'stivnakkede') to admit they made a mistake.

Wikileaks, Kaupthing and the one per cent rule

Crowdsourcing is fascinating business. After Wikileaks recently published top secret information about loans made by Icelandic bank Kaupthing just before the country's economy went belly-up, Informationen.dk interviewed one of Wikileaks' founders, Daniel Schmitt.

It's an interesting interview, worth reading in full (use Google translate if Danish is Greek to you), but I was especially taken by this part:

"The question is if people would like to be James Bond, or if they're happy just watching him on TV. People would like to read news, they sometimes even get excited about what they read, but very often they don't bother readig the documentation. As a result, we are mostly dependent on big media writing about it before people can be bothered reading the documentation." (my translation).

For those familiar with the once per cent rule, this is hardly all that suprising, but in the larger scheme of things I found it worth noting. Not at least for those who are despondent about the future of journalism (where there's demand, a need to me met, there's a market, right?).

Where Murdoch leads, others follow: paid content here we go again

'One great gap separated the advocates or charging for online content from all others, and that was its lack of recognition, its lack of respectability in the eyes of the public, and even in the most advanced circles.'

Then, in April, Rupert Murdoch stepped forward and said readers dependence on free content had to change and, lo and behold, media executives from all over the place stepped forward to praise the virtues of paid content and unveil plans to start charging for online news. At least my newsreader was abuzz with news about media execs all of a sudden coming out as staunch defenders of paid content in all the markets I follow.

A bit like my newsreader has been abuzz this week, though now with reactions to Murdoch's announcement he plans to charge for all his news websites by next summer - most of them decidedly negative: he's mad, he's wrong, what on earth is he thinking, it can never work etc. I find I can't bring myself to get too excited about having that debate again (though I did love this comment by Adam and this post by Charlie Beckett ), so I'd rather just deal with the facts: it might not work, but it will happen. I think Murdoch-biographer Michael Wolff says it well in his comment:

...[Rupert] is going to do the thing he has always done: buck convention, offend sensibilities, and not pussyfoot around. "I believe that if we're successful, we'll be followed fast by other media,” Murdoch said yesterday—which has pretty much been his method of operation in the media business. By force of will and clarity of position, he defines the world.

Now, take Mecom for instance. In Denmark the pan-European media group headed by one of Murdoch's former henchmen, David Montgomery, is ready to roll out a system for micro-payments on its news sites as early as 1 September. The company's Danish CEO, Lisbeth Knudsen, promised they would only charge for unique content, not for general news, but said they were hoping to develope a system for charging for online content that could also be used in other Mecom  countries (in Danish). Of course, despite everything (correct me if I'm, wrong, but I seem to recall Montgomery and Murdoch had some kind of fall out) Montgomery lists Murdoch as the businessman he admires the most, but other media companies have voiced similar plans, so I think we'll see plenty of more paid content experiments in action soon ...

Will I pay? Slightly different debate. Basically, I'm all with what Chris Anderson said here. I'd pay for content I can't live without, but mainstream news site currently offer very little I can't. News Corp., for one, has very little, if any, content that is specialist enough for me, my primary focus being the European media market. Mecom's Danish flagship, Berlingske Tidende, has a pretty decent media section, so perhaps ... if cost cuts don't limit its output more than it already has...

( Oh, and I found the opening quote here, and only made some slight edits to it, after I - struck by how vogue paid content all of a sudden became with media execs - googled "coming out" )

Another Icelandic Media Baron Bites the Dust

Björgólfur Gudmundsson is not only a bank chief in hot water,as The Telegraph describes him today: with his bankruptcy an era in Icelandic media history comes to an end.

Now that both Jon Asgeir Johannessen's investment vehicle Baugur and Björgólfur, also the former owner of West Ham FC, have been declared bankrupt, Iceland's media moguls are officially dead. Between them they used to control most of the tiny island's media, including leading newspapers such as Fréttablaðið, Morgunbladid and DV.

"You know, the sugar daddy behind DV and Fréttablaðið was Baugur, but the sugar daddy behind Morgunbladid was Björgólfur Guðmundsson? Every media here has its problem. We had Jon Asgeir, they have Björgólfur," said Reynir Traustason, Editor-in-chief of DV, when I interviewed him during my reporting trip to Iceland in December last year.

"Our sugar daddies are all dead", he asserted, describing Icelandic media as "alcoholics on detox" (my feature on Ragnarok for Icelandic media ran as the lead story in Journalisten's December issue, and my story on the role online media played in the "fleece revolution for Journalism.co.uk can be found here). I also chronicled the Icelandic newspaper saga for IFRA Magazine last year, as the story is quite amazing.

When I interviewed Metro International's CEO Per Mikael Jensen about the company's Q2 results recently, I solicited questions on Twitter, and when I asked him if there ia a future for free newspapers in the economic downturn, given advertising is in decline - a question submitted by fellow freelance journalist Gwladys Fouché - he said those freesheet closures people referred to "that's those Icelandic guys". A bit rich given how Metro shocked the market by closing its entire Spanish operation in January, but you got to love how he phrased it:

"Remember the crazy guys from Iceland? There was a time there where all of them wanted to buy a football team or a newspaper," he said and remarked how Metro at least closed down Spain in a mature way (more on that here).

 

I'm reminded of these sculptures along the road to Keflavik Airport, some of which seemed to be close to falling down, but I have no idea what they actually represent (snapped from behind the bus window)

Metro International: fast becoming the McDonald's of newspaper companies?

Metro International divests Italian operation but enters into franchise agreement to maintain global advertisment reach.

I was going to call his post "Metro International shrinks further", but felt depressed about the prospect of writing yet another gloomy post on newspapers when it struck me that isn't  Metro International just taking one more step towards becoming the McDonald's of media companies? With new franchise agreements in place in the US, Portugal and Ecuador this year, other places last year, the world's largest publisher of free dailies seems to be moving steadily towards a franchise model akin to McDonald's: global brand, local franchises bearing the financial risks.

With the Italian deal, Metro has successfully divested another unprofitable market, as Piet Bakker's excellent blog rightly predicted would soon be announced earlier this week - which might help improve the company's somewhat gloomy financial results. I still think those numbers are far from fantastic, as indicated here, even though Metro's CEO, Per Mikael Jensen did his best to convince me they were during our talk after the company presented its 2nd quarter (Q2) and half year results 20 July.

"A 12 per cent decline in net revenues is a great result! It's a pretty good result compared to a lot of other media companies," he told me, adding that it was down from minus 16-17 per cent in Q1. Of course, Q2 is usually a better quarter than Q1 for media companies, but the main reason for his exuberance was how a substantial amount of the costs dragging down the result (read the key figures here) was restructuring costs:

"We lost 20 million Euros in 2008, but 11 of those were in the US and Spain. When you close down those operations you have to take the cost, but these are one-off costs: they will not come back. This is why we are reasonably optimistic about the future," he said, and pointed out that at least Metro paid people the money they were owed: "We closed down Spain in a mature way, paid all or dues." Yes, that thick sarcasme is all about Nyhedsavisen, and those "crazy Icelandic guys" as Jensen dubbed them, but that's perhaps a topic for another post (parts of the interview with the Metro boss is available in Norwegian here).

However, I was going to write about Metro International and McDonald's. Mind you, not about McJournalism or the McDonaldization of news, in this case I'm much more interested in the business model. Of course, McDonald's does operate some of its own restaurants, especially in the UK. I don't know if these are the most profitable restaurants or are in markets the company knows intimately, but Metro's strategy has certainly been to hold on to core markets where they've managed to turn over a profit and reduce financial losses and risk by entering into franchise agreements and/or joint ventures in so-called non-core markets.  

Now, McDonald's is so often used to describe everything that's wrong in this world that comparing Metro to it makes it sound like I'm slagging the freesheet publisher off, but one thing you can't take away from McDonald's is its global reach and popularity. The guarantee of getting the same diet, though often with local options on the menue, everywhere has proved to have worldwide appeal. Also, it's the kind of low-cost brand which should prosper in the current downturn as more healthy options becomes too expensive for some - which, if the comparison holds true, at least sounds like good news for Metro's shareholders...

Update 01.08: Michael Jennings pointed out on Twitter yesterday that this comparison is far from perfect, I obviously know the media business better than the fast food business. Apparently McDonald's owns the real estate on which most of its franchised restaurants sit, then the franchisee uses their business model to increase property value.