Group 3 - A visit to Blekinge Läns Tidning!
A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.
-Arthur Miller
When old Arthur Miller wrote this, he couldn’t been more right, that however was in the 1950s, today we live in an ever growing civilization, that squashes you with information if you get left behind. This blog entry centers on what we learned when we visited BLT.
Thursday and it’s raining - who could have known? Apparently though Karlskronas autumns only consists of rain - what a drag. Luckily we had an appointment - an appointment with BLTs magazine director, her name is Kerstin Årmann.
We sat down and waited for her to arrive, though after a time, we realized that we might need to mention that we are sitting here, so we did. After a couple of minutes Kerstin appeared and welcomed us to BLT. She led us to a conference room and bid us to take whichever seat we wanted. She sat down on one side, and well we took the other side.
Traditional news agencies have always had a strong foundation. As we know today though, due to social media interaction, and the coming of the Internet - newspapers have suffered a beating. Our initial discussion surrounded this phenomena a lot - what can BLT do? What can other agencies do? So what can you do? Do you have a golf session with all the higher ups in traditional news agencies? Why the hell would you even do that? My initial thought was really to involve news papers in todays blogger, to make the interaction more personal. At BLT they have a problem though, most news agencies have this - it’s called pride. Some people just don’t want to write a blog, why would I do that? When I can easily just write a very detailed journalistic piece of art? The problem is that the old warhorses don’t want to realize the simple fact that bloggers are biting at your foundation at the moment. (Rome was built for hundreds of years, but was sacked by an uproar from the masses)
Is this an immediate concern for BLT? Not really, Kerstin told us that BLTs role is to be an observer e.g. they observe and implement solutions that works for the industry. The community in Blekinge is evolving rather slowly, so they have the time to really observe - before taking action. In short you could say that if you wanted BLT to grow faster - you’d need the people from Blekinge to take action. In the end it’s all about us consumers - are we happy with what we get? You could say that a prime example is the current BLT website that was made in 2005. Did I just say 2005, yes I did, so what happen’t was that BLT noticed that the interest wasn’t there - we readers didn’t visit BLT enough, so now they are making a new site, with new additions. I personally thought that the vision was really good, so in the future you will be able to visit a new “fresh” site. These additions are mostly to update the already existing areas, but also to provide more social interaction via blogs.
Another aspect that is troubling, but required, is to make money. The economic truth of how traditional media gets their money flow today is still from traditional means e.g. the paper that we buy today from our local news stands, or get home in the post - is still BLT, and many papers primary source of income. This might be news for some, well at least it was news for me - BLT and SydÖstran is merging. This is just another solution to making news more accessible - in the future you will be able to get your Blekinge news from one single platform - the combined site of both together. In the share deliverance of news BLT knows though that a change is needed - they want to be able to give out their newspapers in other formats e.g. the digital formats, and well they want to make more money. In the future you will be able to read BLT at your mobile platform via a mobile application, or a mobile duplicate of the site. You could argue that this is old already, though for BLT it isn’t, and I personally would welcome the choice of getting that application. So there is a plan, not a master plan, but BLT is there for the people of Blekinge. I still continue reading news at BLT - and will do so until I move away from Karlskrona, Blekinge.
Over and out,
Group 3
