Maite Fernandez provides an overview of how news organisations have taken to the web in Uruguay

In Uruguay there are nearly 50 information websites, of which only five are considered as the main competitive news websites in Uruguay:

• www.elpais.com.uy (from the newspaper El País)
• www.observa.com.uy (from the newspaper El Observador)
• www.espectador.com.uy (from the news radio El Espectador)
• www.180.com.uy (independent)
• www.montevideo.com.uy (independent)

Two of them are part of newspaper companies (El Pais.com and Observa.com), one is from a news radio company (El Espectador.com), and the other two are independent. 180.com.uy started last October.

I studied El Pais.com, comparing it to the Argentinian news website Clarin.com. I’ve found that, in general, news companies in Uruguay do not yet see the Internet as a field to invest in, and they still invest money and hire employees for the paper publication (in the case of websites that come from newspapers).

That translated into a poor quality of news website. El País.com did not use video journalism extensively, they did not have a participative journalism area and exclusive breaking news stories were often held back to be published on the newspaper the next day (just to name a few aspects).

The newspaper had a total of 50 journalists, whereas the website had only six, counting journalists and the editor.

In the case of El País, this strategy was justified by saying that the newspaper still reaches more readers than the news website.

Clarin

The case in Clarín was quite different. At the time I visited the company they were merging both newsrooms, and there was a lot of fear and uncertainty on how that would work.

Clarin.com had a staff of 53 journalists and editors. In Clarín it was clear that they were putting the site first, and the newspaper was starting to be seen as an alternative form of publication.

Clarín CEO Ricardo Kirschbaum explained in an internal memo that news is a 24 hour activity that is published in paper once a day, and that he expected newspaper journalists to adapt to the new times and learn how to film an edit video, among other skills.

Before the merge took place a team of Clarín visited several news companies such as The Guardian and Spanish newspapers, and they were advised by experts from Spain and Columbia University. What determined the merge according to some decision makers of Clarín was that the news website was reaching more readers than the newspaper. In fact, its main competitor in Argentina, La Nacion.com, had merged its newsrooms too.

Not late to the net

Uruguay’s case seemed unusual. The first news website appeared in Uruguay in September 1995, before The New York Times or some of the most prestigious Argentinian websites (which are a frequent reference point in Uruguay). So the actual situation of a relative backwardness compared to other countries cannot be explained with the argument that the news companies decided to go digital rather late.

Apart from that, the country has always shown a good internet penetration rate (33% of more than 3.000.000 inhabitants according to the latest studies).

In addition to that, there is a government program called “Plan Ceibal” (more details here). The program is an adaptation of Nicholas Negroponte’s “One laptop per child”, using Uruguay as a study case.

The plan has already given 100.000 laptops to public school kids, and it is intended to be extended to elementary teachers and to high school education (more than 300.000 between students and teachers).

If the program shows good results, as it is showing already, it can be expected that in the next 5 to 10 years those kids could be fully integrated to the digital culture, and therefore, more likely to consume news from the Internet. I guess newspapers managers should keep that in mind.

On the other hand, in the case of El País more than in the rest of the news websites, it was very clear that the site had not yet managed to make profits. This was a strong argument against investing and innovating more in the website.

Uruguay has one of the lowest rates of advertisement investment on Internet compared with other countries of the region (1,8% of the Gross Domestic Product, whereas Argentina has 2,06% and Brazil has 3,3%). This is supposed to change in the next years according to the advertisement managers of some of the news media, mainly because the Interactive Advertisement Bureau (IAB) has recently opened an office in Uruguay, which would help to develop the market and to attract more advertisers.

I guess that the conclusion regarding digital news in Uruguay is simply: the best is yet to come.

Note: the analysis of Clarín.com and El País Digital was conducted from May to August 2008. El País conducted a major redesign of its website in September, including more videos and participatory journalism.

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The Online Journalism Atlas continues, with Kristine Lowe looking at online journalism in Norway, where some newspapers make more money online than in print. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

Norway is one of the most newspaper-reading in countries in the world, a fact also reflected in the country’s online media environment. In contrast to many other countries, Norwegians seem to prefer news-driven sites with journalistic content to all others. 

Early starters

Early adoption has put Norwegian online media at a great at advantage, some of the online players even earn good money.  

The first traditional Norwegian newspaper to hit the web was Brönnöysundsavis, a regional paper which launched its online edition 6 March 1995, closely followed by Dagbladet, the country’s second biggest tabloid.  

Norway’s biggest newspaper, VG, a tabloid, and Aftenposten, the country’s biggest broadsheet, both owned by Norwegian media group Schibsted, also started publishing online in 1995. Schibsted, who own media assets in a number of other European countries, have since garnered international recognition for their successful transition online. Following a favourable mention in  the Economist, this transition was even put on the curriculum at Harvard University.

VG is now not only Norway’s most read news site, it is the country’s most visited website overall. 

Another early starter was Nettavisen, the country’s first online only newspaper, which saw daylight on 1 November 1996. The founders of this paper later helped start German sister site Netzeitung in 2000. 

Ownership structure and profits 

Schibsted

Schibsted is the dominant player in Norway’s media landscape. The company owns VG, the most read newspaper both on paper and online, and Aftenposten, the most influential national newspaper. The media group also owns the country’s biggest online market place, Finn.no, Norwegian search engine Sesam Sök and stakes in several of the major regional newspapers.  The country’s most read business site, E24, is also a Schibsted product.

To give a clue about the audience the site aims to attract: its Swedish sister site famously advertised for “journalists with expensive habits” in 2007.  Innovation is expensive, and many of Schibsted’s most recent ventures, like its European freesheets, are loss-making, but several of its online product are very profitable. Finn.no has had a profit margin around 40 per cent for three consecutive years (2003 – 2006), and VG.no is in a similar position: for 2007, it is expected to deliver a profit margin of 42 – 45 per cent. Schibsted’s newspapers have traditionally been politically conservative. 

Dagbladet

Dagbladet is the country’s second biggest tabloid. Owned by the Berner group, the liberal newspaper is in the unique position that it has more readers online than in print. Online is also where Dagbladet makes money (the print version is in the red). Dagbladet online recorded a record profit of 26,6 per cent in 2005, but this was reduced to 13 per cent in 2006. 

Edda Media

Edda Media is the Norwegian arm of Mecom. The newspaper group consists of a number of regional and local newspapers, with a total of 27 online newspapers, as well as local radio and TV stations (some of which are subsidiaries of the respective local newspapers) and a few specialist online portals. When the company was acquired by the British group in 2006 it had an average profit margin of 7.5 percent. 

A-pressen and TV2

A-pressen is another major media group, owned by the Labour Union, Telenor, the country’s partly-privatised phone company, and free speech charity Fritt Ord. The group owns a number of local and regional newspaper, as well as 50 per cent of the country’s biggest commercial TV channel, TV2.

Until recently, A-pressen was not known for being very innovative online, but it is now pressing ahead with a new online venture together with TV2 that has seen the two share more content and launch ‘hyperlocal’ search engine derdubor.no (where you live). 

TV2 bought Nettavisen in 2003, and until recently the news site provided almost all of the content for the TV channels website. This is about to change, and under the leadership of TV2′s new CEO, Alf Hildrum, the company will use more resources on developing a website aimed at marketing the TV channel’s programmes. 

Public broadcasting

Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK, has also focused a lot more on its website recently, launching a number of new online portals – such as weather portal yr.no and children’s portal super.no. It is expected that NRK will see substantial traffic increase to its website as it starts opening up more and more of its archive in 2008, enabling users to download archive material for free.

The online team at NRK is also actively marketing NRK’s content  in places like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, and has signed an agreement with Joost to broadcast a separate NRK channel there.  

Other players

There are currently two other major TV channels in Norway: TVN, owned by German Pro Sieben; and TV3 Norway, owned by Swedish Modern Times Group (MTG), but the websites of both are focused on marketing TV content, not on online journalism. 

ABC Startsiden, owned by Telenor, is currently Norway’s third most used website. It comprises Startsiden.no (a catalogue of websites), a search engine and a WAP-service. In March 2007 it launched its own news site, ABC Nyheter. The news site was the first commercial site in Norway to nurture citizen journalism as part of its site. ‘Citizen articles’ is currently a separate section on the site, but articles from this section are sometimes used in the main section of the site, always clearly labelled ‘citizen articles’. The internet company delivered a 65 per cent profit margin in 2006, a margin expected to be marginally down for 2007. 

Aller Internett is made up of ten different news sites: some of the oldest, like IT-site digi.no, going all the way back to 1996. Together with TV2 Nettavisen and Norway’s four biggest regional newspapers, it also owns business site NA24 – the second most-read business site after E24. 

Other notable Norwegian news outlets are Dagens Naeringsliv and Finansavisen (both financial dailies) Dagsavisen,  Klassekampen and Morgenbladet, all newspapers and all with news sites, but none of these have made a huge impact in the online environment.

Blogs, Social Networks and Community

In an egalitarian country such as Norway, it’s perhaps not surprising that the newspapers have left most of the blogging their to readers, rather than encouraging their reporters to venture into the blogosphere.

Dagbladet is a notable exception, its reporters started blogging as early as 2002, but these blogging efforts were more mostly abandoned. Since 2005, Dagbladet and VG have both had blogging platforms where readers are encouraged to set up blogs. These thriving blogging communities are further encouraged by competitions to write ‘blog post of the week’ etc. (MyTelegraph was a latecomer compared to these two online newspaper communities). 

Other than that, Aftenposten has set up a blogging site for its foreign correspondents, but there’s not much blogging going on there as of yet. Most of the national newspapers do have something called blogs on their sites, but the content is more akin to traditional op-eds published on a blog platform, and the feeling of reading an op-ed is exacerbated by the fact that many of the online newspapers don’t link out.   

VG and Dagbladet also have their own social networks, Nettby and Blink, both launched in 2006. The former is the second largest social network in Norway, with 606,000 registered users. 

Outside of mainstream media, Norway does have a thriving blogging scene, though in contrast to England, we haven’t seen blogs setting the political agenda in any major way. Norwegian blogs tend to be more diary-like, often almost literary in form. 

Among more co-ordinated non-mainstream online media sites, INorden, the Scandinavian citizen journalism site written by bloggers, and Sonitus, a ‘human blog aggregator’ – a site made possible by dedicated individuals who continuously sift through Norwegian blogs to pull out the best blog posts – also deserve to be mentioned.  

Education

Traditionally, the journalism schools at Volda and in Oslo have been the two main institutions training journalists: the former used to educate the broadcast journalists, the latter the print journalists. With the new focus on multimedia journalism, this is now changing and both schools strive to incorporate more training in online journalism.

There are also a number of other journalism schools in the country, including a course whose graduates are currently in so much in demand that many are recruited before they graduate: a BA in business journalism at business school, BI. 

Kristine Lowe is a journalist and blogger who writes for a number of Norwegian, British and American clients. Of the organisations mentioned here, Kristine has worked for NRK, Dagens Naeringsliv, NA24 and ABC Nyheter in recent times. She is also a regular contributor to Ethical Space: the international journal for communication ethics. 

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In the latest part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Liz Bridgen looks at the online media scene in Iceland. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

As the country with the world’s deepest penetration of internet use (86.3% of the population) and highest literacy rate (around 99%), it’s no surprise that Iceland should have a buoyant online media scene.

The print, broadcast and online environment

Iceland’s population of just over 300,000 have a choice of three national Icelandic-language newspapers – all with online editions – plus several domestic English-language titles aimed dually at tourists and the growing útlendingur (foreigner) population.

The broadsheet Morgunblaðið (The Morning Paper) is the country’s daily ‘paper of record.’  Its content-rich online edition http://www.mbl.is/ is a resource of the day’s international, national and local news with additional links to sections including Viðskipti (Business), Fólk (People) and Íþróttir (Sport),  along with a link to Enski boltinn (English football) news (Icelanders follow English football and current affairs with considerable attention).   The website also has a sizable and searchable Myndasafn (photo store).

The main paid-for competition comes in the form of tabloid DV (Dagblaðið Vísir).  Its online edition http://www.dv.is/  is considerably more limited than its rival’s and focuses on the day’s main Fréttir (news) with just over a dozen international, national and local stories featured each day.   The DV website also provides a window to its publisher’s magazines  - such as the celebrity and readers’-true-story magazine Séð og Heyrt (Seen and Heard).  These magazine sub-sites highlight the latest issue’s headline stories.

The young pretender in the Icelandic media scene is Fréttablaðið (The Free Paper) which has been distributed to most Icelandic homes since 2001 and is now the largest circulation newspaper in Iceland.  Its online edition – as such – is hosted via its parent company’s website in the form of a PDF of the day’s newspaper.   However media group 365, whose portfolio also includes national and local TV channels, radio stations and magazines, draws its outlets together online under the http://www.visir.is/ website to create a sizeable resource of international, national and local news and features.

RÚV, Iceland’s public service broadcaster, controls the Sjónvarpið TV channel and the Rás 1 and Rás 2 radio stations.  Its website http://www.ruv.is/ provides headline news – listed by the time the story broke – and allows the user to stream live radio too.

Icelandic is claimed to be one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn, and with an increasing number of útlendingar (foreigners) working in the country, foreign-language online media is a particularly valuable resource for the non-Icelandic population (who principally speak English, Polish, Serbo-Croat and Thai).  These websites serve a dual purpose – since the Icelandic economy relies heavily on tourism, such media also provides background information on the country and its culture for tourists.

The English-language Iceland Review is a chic travel and culture magazine for the affluent Icelandophile.  However, its website at http://www.icelandreview.com/ is markedly different from the high quality gloss of its sister publication and instead focuses on giving the user a snapshot of the day’s Icelandic news stories.  While the magazine is beautifully written, mostly by American and English journalists (whose work often appears in the side columns of the website), the style of the website’s daily news is closer to a direct translation of the Icelandic newspapers that it uses as its sources (featuring stories such as ‘Dead Dolphin Found in Reykjavík Suburb,’ ‘Police Investigate Book Larceny from Estate’ and ‘Faroese Securities Enter Iceland’s Stock Market’).

Finally the irreverent Reykjavik Grapevine, published 18 times each year, provides an English-language view of the city’s life and culture for the younger or more edgy reader.  The online edition at http://www.grapevine.is/   features news, reviews and comment, written by both Icelanders and native English speakers

Blog, bloggers and blogging

Icelanders love to blog, and blogging has been absorbed into mainstream culture to such an extent that personal blogs are now incorporated into all the main newspaper websites. While there has always been a view that if you write in Icelandic you can write what you like (on the grounds that very few non-Icelanders speak Icelandic), the growing number of foreign speakers of the language and the realisation that private comment has a global reach in the blogosphere, means that some Icelanders are learning to temper what they write.

http://www.mbl.is/ has a Bloggið (The Blog) page which publishes the day’s Icelandic blog posts – on a typical day it can feature over 100 blog posts and comments.  Meanwhile, in common with the newspaper’s theme of providing a sizeable online resource, the site publishes Icelandic blog entries listed by both creator and tag, along with RSS feed information.   Here it’s possible to discover that over 300 blog posts have been written (in Icelandic) on Formula One and that over 5,000 have been written on Stjornmal_og_Samfelag (Politics and Society).   

Likewise, http://www.visir.is/ also lists hundreds of Icelandic blog posts – again by tag – on its Blogg page.  There is a link to 365′s own blog on this page – a very corporate affair – and it its journalists’ own blogs.

Meanwhile, http://www.dv.is/ uses its writers to create blog entries on its Blogg pages.

Interestingly, although there’s little attempt at founding social networks via any of these websites, its not because Facebook and MySpace are unpopular – both are widely used, with the Icelandic network on Facebook having over 17,000 members.  There is an Icelandic social networking site, www.minnsirkus.is, but it doesn’t have the popularity of Facebook among Icelanders.

Iceland’s útlendingur (foreigner) population are also bloggers.   Many come to Iceland to work on short and medium-term contracts and the blogs are often closer to long letters home.  One of the first examples of these was Douglas Dankel’s http://www.the-saga.net/, which details the University of Florida professor’s Icelandic experiences while teaching at the University of Akureyri  between 2003 and 2005.

There’s a list of foreign-language útlendingur and traveller blogs at www.icelandreview.com/links/

Add to or edit this article here. Liz Bridgen is Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer, Public Relations, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She would like to thank Sigurbjörn J. Gunnarsson for his help with this article.

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In the third part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer looks at how the news industry in Germany first went online, the German blogosphere, online journalism education, and – well, it’s a very comprehensive overview indeed. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

History

Germany’s online journalism had a pretty good start in the mid-90s. News magazine DER SPIEGEL was among the first to use the proprietary online service Compuserve for pre-publishing its weekly title story and some extracts, as well as providing discussion space for their readers’ feedback. On Compuserve they hosted the first public chat with a politician, the then prime minister of the eastern German state of Saxonia, Kurt Biedenkopf (an event that made it to the front page of Wall Street Journal).

SPIEGEL was also the first German publication to go online in 1994, some days before TIME Magazine in the US. One year later they presented the first professionally designed homepage and an addition of online-exclusive content.

Other early adopters include the public TV news show tagesschau, the highbrow weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, and SPIEGEL’s arch-rival Focus. Two pioneers of internet-exclusive online journalism are worth mentioning: the short-lived magazine Wildpark, provided by the big web agency Pixelpark and somehow modelled upon Wired Magazine’s then ultra-hip website Hot Wired, and the technology/culture/politics magazine Telepolis, a small but ambitious publication coming from the renowned computer magazine publisher Heise in Hannover, which still exists.

Like everywhere else, it was mostly the bad news, like the Princess of Wales’ death, the ICE train desaster in Eschede, September 11, the tsunami in south and southeast Asia, or the bombings of Madrid and London, that pushed online news production to the attention of a wider audience.

Up to now, it’s still mostly news that german online journalism is focussed on. There is still very little background, very little good magazine-style work to be proud of.

National Newspapers and Magazines

If you leave aside the big portal providers, like telecommunication giant Telekom’s T-Online or Yahoo, MSN and national webmail providers Web.de and GMX, it’s SPIEGEL ONLINE who leads the pack of proper online journalism websites, with nearly 4.5 million unique users and a very comfortable margin separating it from its competitors.

Next is the tabloid newspaper BILD (with a lot of page-3-style naked attractions guaranteeing success with their 3.8 million uniques), further down the line we find the magazines STERN and FOCUS with 2.2 million uniques each, and the nationaly high-quality dailies Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and DIE WELT with 1.7, 1.7 and 1.2 million unique users.

There have been a lot of attempts to kick market leader SPIEGEL’s ass recently with relaunches at all the major news websites, mostly adding all the necessary Web 2.0 bells and whistles. But none of them have been really successful, mostly because nearly all of the results look very much like Spiegel.de.

(All the numbers are 2nd Quarter 2007.)

Public Television and Radio

Commercial publishing companies are not happy with Germany’s public TV and radio providers’ recent announcement of putting much more effort into their Internet products.

Up to now the latter have mostly restricted themselves to so-called ‘programmbegleitende Angebote’ (secondary services related to TV and radio shows). But observing the big success of BBC’s Internet strategy, particularly, has triggered some visions and desires, and there are major projects on their way, mainly about giving the users access to the riches of the providers’ archives.

Online Only

Apart from the online magazine Telepolis, mentioned above, there are very few professional online-only journalistic websites. One of them, Netzeitung, was founded in 2000 by the Norwegian publisher of nettavisen.no and did reasonably well for some years before being sold to a group of private equity investors in summer 2007. Now the site is drifting in some kind of limbo.

Including the Amateurs

The hype surrounding citizen journalism has not stopped at German borders. But letting amateurs contribute seems to be not a very good strategy with German readers. Some regional newspapers experimented with user blogs, attracting not more than a few hundred bloggers each. Many newspaper websites now provide some ‘reader reporter’ interface for contributing juicy celebrity or bloody accident pictures and the like, the most prominent one being national tabloid BILD, which also offered some kind of fake press card to their readers.

Notable exceptions to the bleak picture are two online magazines addressing young people (mostly with some higher level education): Neon.de and jetzt.de. Both of them have seamlessly integrated professional editorial content and readers’s contributions, and host very lively communities.

National newspaper DIE WELT has tried to copy The Guardian’s successful platform Comment is free with their Welt Debatte, but their own contributions are not good enough to attract a bigger audience and they never succeeded in integrating enough interesting external authors.

Some other professional publications include weblogs by editorial staff of paid guests, the most prolific being DIE ZEIT with a portfolio of more than 30 weblogs, some of them very good.

Blogosphere

A similar picture emerges with the German blogosphere, which is mostly in a very sorry state, both in terms of numbers and quality. According to a survey from October 2007 there are 880,000 bloggers in Germany, with 340,000 of them blogging regularly. (Compare this to the 12 million bloggers in the French community provider Skyrock, just to take one example…)

The most successful blog in Germany (in terms of cross-linking) is Basic Thinking, a personal blog by the opinionated Web 2.0 consultant Robert Basic. The runners-up are BildBlog, a very funny and well-done watchblog focussing on the BILD tabloid, Spreeblick, a weblog from Berlin by a group of authors surrounding former punk musician and radio host Johnny Haeusler, and BildBlog co-founder Stefan Niggemeier’s private blog. Niggemeier is a freelance media journalist, and his blog is one of the best sources on media topics in Germany.

The Spreeblick guys have made the first attempt to establish a commercial network of weblogs, but the project stagnated, not least because Haeusler wasn’t able to recruit enough talented bloggers.

All in all, the german blogosphere has only a very small circle of nationally known “power bloggers”, and it is ridden with a lot of self-importance and adolescent infighting. Also, any attempt to turn blogging into some professional and commercially successful venture is accompanied by suspicion and resentment.

Aggregation

There is one more specialty worth separate mention: The small but devoted team around Thierry Chervel and Anja Seeliger in Berlin who, under the name of Perlentaucher (pearl diver), have made it their business to give a daily overview on the ‘Feuilleton’ (arts and literature) sections of german language newspapers (partial english version).

They also produce several other products, including a weekly international magazine roundup including magazines from countries as far as India or Egypt (english version), the multi-language european press review eurotopics, and a daily overview on recent book reviews.

The latter has brought them under attack by German newspaper publishers. In an incredibly stupid move, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Sueddeutsche Zeitung have sued Perlentaucher for their aggregation of FAZ and SZ book reviews. (Perlentaucher only gives a summary, linking to the orginal reviews.) On Dec 11, 2007, Perlentaucher announced that they won the case at the appellate court.)

Professional Journals

Apart from rather frequent contributions in traditional journalism and media magazines, there is only one publication focussing on online media only. It’s the web-based onlinejournalismus.de, originally a highly ambitious web magazine founded by some journalism students, now reduced to a much less ambitious weblog, unfortunately. Some other weblogs, most of them by online journalism practitioners, deal with topics of the profession.

Awards

There are two major online journalism awards in Germany. One, the Axel Springer Preis für junge Journalisten (Internet) is focussed on individual contributions by young online journalists, the other, Grimme Online Award, is broader in scope.

Education

In Germany journalism education comes in three guises:

First, and most basic, there is a kind of guided internship (lasting between one and two years) called “volontariat”, interspersed with additional theoretical instruction held by special institutions. In the last years there have been some first “Volontariate” provided by online publications like spiegel.de.

Second, there are a handful of (pretty elitist) journalism schools. Most of them now have included multimedia and online elements into their curricula. An attempt by the most renowned one, the Henri-Nannen-Schule in Hamburg, to establish an online only program, has been given up after only a short time (somewhen around the year 2000).

Third, there is the academic education, at regular universities and universities of applied sciences. Academic journalism education doesn’t have a very good reputation in the media market, mostly because it’s still considered to be too theoretical. Like with the journalism schools, most academic programs have included online and multimedia courses. Only two programs focus exclusively on online journalism: one a the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, the other at the University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt.

Recent Trends

There has been a wave of newspaper site relaunches recently, mostly adapting the sites to Web 2.0 standards and acknowledging the current shift in advertising money towards the Internet by adding some staff and new projects.

One of these stands out: The West German newspaper group around Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung has developed an integrated regional portal, DerWesten.de, under the guidance of former blogger Katharina Borchert. DerWesten.de includes a smart platform for user generated content and first attempts at comprehensive geo-tagging for local news and UGC.

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In the second part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Nico Luchsinger looks at how the news industry in Switzerland is experimenting with new media – and how new media is experimenting with news. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

In late August this year [2007], the Swiss Publisher’s Association (VSP) issued a statement. In it, the publishers attacked the Google News service, claiming that Google were infringing copyrights with the news aggregation service, and announced plans to launch their own news portal to rival the internet giant. A few weeks later, VSP president Hanspeter Lebrument was quoted as saying that “Google is afraid of us. If we’re not around anymore, Google has no content to offer.”

The reaction in the Swiss blogosphere to the VSP’s plans ranged from astonishment to desperation. “It is highly unlikely that Google will listen to the claims of Swiss publishers”, wrote media blogger Andreas Goeldi. (This view was confirmed a few months later when Google Switzerland boss Andreas Schoenenberger politely but firmly rejected the VSP’s accusations.)

Cautious and slow

The short episode is typical of the current situation in Swiss online journalism. Newspaper publishers view the internet rather as a threat than as a possibility. A small community of (media) bloggers thinks to know better, but is hardly ever listened to. The publishers (who, in Switzerland as much as anywhere else in the world, have never been the spearheads of innovation) have become more and more insecure as their core business – printing newspaper – is slowly eroding.

After a promising start in the mid-nineties, innovation on the web from traditional newspapers has been slow. “What the newspapers do online is mostly boring. There is no readiness to assume a risk or launch an experiment”, says Martin Hitz, who writes the influential media blog Medienspiegel.

The country’s best-selling newspaper, Blick, runs a rather uninteresting website that features, as the paper itself, mostly sensationalist stories with a few web 2.0 features such as commenting and rating of articles.

The Zurich-based Tages-Anzeiger, which from time to time calls itself “Switzerland’s best-selling quality newspaper”, has a similarly uninspiring presence on the web. Even after a recent redesign, the site looks like a relic from the late nineties. The content consists of selected articles from today’s print edition, a lot of hardly edited news agency infos, and some blogs, which are marginalised on the site and, it seems, not widely read.

The website of the also-Zurich-based Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), which has a lower circulation than the Tages-Anzeiger but bigger international renown, is far more popular (full disclosure: I used to be an editor for NZZ Online and am now a freelance contributor to the print edition). It underwent a complete redesign in July, which allowed for more flexibility in online publishing, but got mixed design and usability reviews. The redesign allowed readers to comment on every story, although comments are moderated, and it often takes several hours until they are approved.

The NZZ has also started to experiment with “blogs” from some of its foreign correspondents. While the quality of this content is excellent, the mere fact that the blogs do not have a feed renders the experiment potentially irrelevant. The NZZ runs also two independent blogging platforms (with feeds): on NZZvotum politicians from all parties write about their goals, and on NZZcampus, students from different universities blog about their life.

Like the Tages-Anzeiger and most other Swiss newspapers, the NZZ only puts part of its print edition online, and only for a limited time. “I just don’t understand why they are not giving away all their content online for free”, says media blogger Martin Hitz. “How do they expect to establish their brands online?” At least, the Tages-Anzeiger and, to a lesser extent, the NZZ have now begun to implement a cautious online-first strategy, where some articles from the forthcoming print edition are published first online.

Let’s print more free dailies

One of the reasons that the traditional daily newspapers have been under pressure are the free dailies. The biggest of them, 20 Minuten (which is, as the Tages-Anzeiger, owned by the Tamedia Group), is now by far the most-read newspaper in the country. A year ago, the Ringier media group (which owns Blick), launched the free daily heute, which is published in the afternoon.

In September 2007, media entrepreneur Sacha Wigdorovits, who was once editor-in-chief of Blick, launched yet another free daily, called .ch. This prompted the Tamedia Group to launch, in December, its second free daily News to compete with .ch. Together with the Le Matin bleu, a free daily published in the French-speaking part of the country, the estimated circulation of all the free dailies amounts to more than two million – in a country with a population of seven million. Most observers agree that this situation will not be sustainable, and that in the long run, only one of the free dailies will be able to survive.

All the free dailies run websites, with 20 Minuten being by far the most successful. With an online staff of about 30 people (which heavily exceeds the online staff of all other newspapers), it quickly became one of the most-visited websites in Switzerland. It features a lot of multimedia content and community options.

20 Minuten also tries to link its print edition to additional content on its website, and regularly prints excerpts from user discussions in its online forums. Its large editorial staff allows 20 Minuten to produce a lot of content for online-only use.

On the other side of the Röschtigraben

The picture gets slightly more interesting when one looks on the other site of the Röschtigraben - the line that divides the German- and French-speaking parts of the country. The Tribune de Genève hosts a blogging platform for its readers, whose blogs are prominently featured on the Tribune’s website as well as in the printed paper. It also publishes some podcasts. Le Matin, which like the Tribune is owned by the Edipresse Group, has at least a decently designed webpage, vaguely reminiscent of the Guardian’s website.

The clear front-runner in online journalism in Switzerland is the Ringier-owned weekly magazine L’Hebdo. It won much praise when, during the riots in French banlieues in 2005, it started the Bondyblog, where reporters wrote directly from the banlieues. The blog still exists, although it is now operated by a couple of young citizen journalists in France, and L’Hebdo only remains a partner to the blog.

More recently, L’Hebdo started Blog & Breakfast to cover the Swiss national elections which took place on October 21. Hebdo reporters visited candidates for the national parliament and stayed at their place for one night. The blog featured a lot of video and photo content. All posts where geotagged and could be browsed via an interactive map.

It is worth mentioning shortly the homepages of the magazines published by the Tages-Anzeiger and the NZZ: The Magazin, a weekly supplement to the Tages-Anzeiger, has recently redesigned its website. The new site is based on wiki technology, but readers can so far only collaborate by writing comments on the articles (which, at least, are all published in their entirety at the same time as in the print edition). NZZ Folio, which is each month devoted to one specific subject, can also be accessed online, and is additionally published as a downloadable audio version.

Too small a market?

Media blogger Martin Hitz sees the main reason for the slow online innovation in Switzerland in the relatively small market size. “In Germany, you can reach potentially millions with a new online offer, even if it is devoted to a very specific subject. Online editors in Switzerland very often just lack the resources to be innovative”, he says. There are, however, signs that some things will change in Swiss online journalism, although at a slow pace.

The Tamedia group announced that it will, in addition to their new free daily News, launch a new online portal in the first quarter of 2008. The portal, which will feature content from the Tages-Anzeiger, the Berner Zeitung and the Basler Zeitung, will have a “moderate online-first strategy” (whatever that means).

The website of Facts, a political weekly magazine owned also by Tamedia that has ceased publication this summer, was recently reborn as FACTS 2.0, which aggregates content from Swiss and German news sites and blogs, and lets users vote and comment on the stories. The business model of the site, said its boss Chris Luescher recently at a conference, is to sell the discussions of its users on a particular article back to the original source. While there is a lot of skepticism on whether this idea can work, it is at least proof of some innovation taking place.

The not-so-influential blogosphere

The gap in online journalism left by traditional media has so far not been filled by newcomers, let alone bloggers. While the Swiss blogosphere becomes more and more connected, it remains rather small (as the country itself) and without much influence on mainstream opinion. This is – again – at least in part due to the fact that the size of the Swiss market makes it virtually impossible to blog professionally.

The very notable exception is Blogwerk, an online-only publisher which pays its authors for blogging. Blogwerk currently publishes four blogs devoted to media, gadgets, photography and productivity, with more to follow soon. All the sites experience strong growth, wrote its founder and CEO Peter Hogenkamp in October when he announced that Blogwerk had raised some 300’000 Swiss francs (180’000 Euro) in additional venture capital. The Blogwerk blogs, however, are targeted not only at a Swiss, but at a German-speaking audience.

Another example is the blog Krusenstern which focuses on Russia and the Ukraine. While its author, the journalist Juerg Vollmer, does not work full time for his blog, the quality of his entries is exceptionally high and has led to the blog being widely read throughout German-speaking countries.

The Swiss mainstream media, meanwhile, does not ignore blogs completely. In fact, citation of blogs in Swiss print media has increased significantly over the last few years, writes political science student Sarah Genner in her recently completed master thesis on “Blogs and Democracy”. However, the quoted blogs tend to be written by people who are already part of the public discussion, such as politicans and journalists (the blog that was quoted most often was the one of Swiss government member Moritz Leuenberger). The blogs, concludes Genner, tend to amplify voices that have already been heard before rather than broadening the discussion.

Conclusion

Switzerland’s online media landscape suffers from a lack of innovation. This is partially due to the limited resources that traditional media can devote to online projects, but also due to the mindset of many Swiss publishers which continue to see the internet as a threat (or, even worse, as a temporary hype). Consequently, notes media blogger Martin Hitz, online journalists are often treated as “second-class editors”. Swiss bloggers remain a small group, largely occupied with themselves, with only a few blogs having access to a broader audience. And while there are some online journalism projects worth watching closely, Switzerland is, even within Europe, still lagging several years behind.

This article is available as a wiki to be updated, corrected, or added to. Please help improve it if you can.

Nico Luchsinger, 25, is a history student and freelance journalist based in Zurich. He blogs at Hundertfünfzig Worte.

PHP Freelancer

In the first part of the Online Journalism Atlas, Gabriela Zago looks at online journalism in Brazil. Got any information about your own country’s online journalism? Add it here.

Online journalism in Brazil has grown a lot in the last few years, especially in the last 12 months. Many websites have changed their models recently, going from a traditional style to a more “web 2.0″ concept. The community participation and the use of new tools are growing since then. Blogs are a constant.

News are produced on portals like Terra (http://www.terra.com.br) and IG (http://ultimosegundo.ig.com.br). These websites don’t have a great journalism tradition, but they manage to have a good audience on the web anyway. Both have spaces for readers to participate (vc reporter – http://www.terra.com.br/vcreporter/ – at Terra, Minha Noticia – http://minhanoticia.ig.com.br/ – on IG).

Websites from big news organizations, like Folha Online (http://www.folha.com.br) and Estadão (http://www.estadao.com.br) (both from São Paulo and with a print tradition) and Globo.comhttp://www.globo.com) (Globo dominates the TV media in Brazil) have changed their pages recently. And they seem to focus now more on interation. (

Globo has also G1 (http://www.g1.com.br), a news website that was launched last year, and is growing fast. The interesting part of G1 is that they can provide videos to illustrate the news, since Globo has a big TV coverage.

On September 19th, another online journal launched a new page, Zero Hora (http://www.zerohora.com.br) from Porto Alegre. Previously the site only offered an online version of the print newspaper; now they have blogs, real-time news coverage, and a channel for readers to participate.

The online journal Estadão ended up with a bad image among bloggers after releasing an ad campaign that compared bloggers to monkeys (http://br.youtube.com/watch?v=vTA26q7zlE4), on July. They generated a big debate over credibility on the web after it. People are still discussing it a lot on their blogs.

User participation seems to be the new trend around here. All news organizations that changed their websites in the last three months (Folha Online, Estadão, Globo.com, Zero Hora) have added spaces for readers to participate, through comments on the news or even by allowing them to ‘produce news’ (although most of the time this “participation” is limited to sending a text, or a picture, that will have to pass through the hands of a journalist before being published).

Print newspapers and TV still have a big role in Brazil, but people are consuming more and more news online. Mobile has low participation, but this might change in the future, since a lot of research is being done on the subject.

A lot of websites have changed lately, but there are few making real innovations. The examples are isolated, like G1 and Estadão – which have news distributed in Second Life – and IG – which sends updates via Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/ultimosegundo).

PHP Freelancer

We’re a blinkered bunch. Most of what I see in online journalism blogs tends to be about what’s happening in America, or the UK. What about the non-English speaking world? And, er, Canada? So here’s my attempt to address that: an online journalism atlas.

It’s a wiki (naturally) so that you can add information about your own country, or edit an existing entry. The structure is up to you too – if you want to write about local newspaper websites, great. Broadcasters? Fine. The blogosphere? Wonderful.

I know this blog has readers in dozens of countries, so I want to extend this invitation to you all: I’ve done enough talking – I, and I’m sure other readers, would be very very interested in what the state of play is in your neck of the woods. Broaden our minds. Correct the Anglo-American bias. Oh, and tell us what’s happening in Canada.

All contributions, however small, are more than welcomed. And I’ll be publishing excerpts on the OJB. Thanks,

Paul

PHP Freelancer