According to Børsen today, Dagsbrun wants to conquer cyberspace, and has hired in Morten Lund, publicly known as one of the Skype-investors (here’s his blog) to devellop the online-edition of the comming free newspaper “Nyhedsavisen” (here’s their present site)
Usergenerated content?
The story says very little about the substance of the Dagsbrun/Nyhedsavisen initative, except form stating it will allow media-users to voice their opinions… Sounds like usergenerated content, but how far will they take it? Article quotes Morten Lund for stating that there’s a “hole in the market” he’d like to fill out, he’s “not impressed with the established medias performance, treating online nothing more than an ugly newspaper on the net”. Futhermore he hopes for a “global roll-out”
Will this be something like the newly emancipated Netscape News, perhaps?
Could Nyhedsavisen be planning an OhMyNews on the Danish market ? At least there seems to an idea left to the one using it. Nyhedsavisen is breaking important rules of competition in newspaper publishing, so why not on the web.
Morten Nielsen
Personally I doubt the concept of OhMyNews on the long haul – and especially in Denmark – for various reasons:
1. OhMyNews is born in a country famous for rigid government control of the media. In other words OhMyNews was the first real opportunity for the people to be heard – I don’t see us having that issue and thus need in Denmark with our democratic history.
2. OhMyNews is all about the long tail. Only a tiny percentage of the user generated content – especially measured towards the number of creators – make it to the homepage and thus get any traction. Majority of the content is created by professionals. Thus I will argue that basically there’s no difference other than serious hype between OhMyNews and a newspaper empowering user blogs.
3. You could argue that Danes are lazy. I mean, studies show that only 3 % have tried to blog. If the need for self expression via blogs was that immense in Denmark that number should by now (considering how tech and net savvy we all are) be far higher.