NodeOne reports from: Swedish newspaper business days - "TU Branschdagarna"

The first day had 3 international speakers, 2 on stage and one over Skype from Japan. The first speaker is Thyler Brülé founder of Monocle and Wallpaper. Thyler gave a very inspiring speech about how the Monocle always done what they believe in. He also talked about that they have newer give anything away for free, and they never take anything for free either.

Next up over Skype was Marco Koeder writer of the book - The six immutable laws of mobile business. Marco went through the history of the Japanese mobile market. Japan is almost 10 years ahead of the rest of the world in all kind of numbers around mobile business. However the rich part of the rest of the world is catching up quickly. Marco described the keys of success are: flat rate mobile internet, Simplexity - meaning advanced functions for the user with great usability, have you heard it before? Isn't this exactly why the iPhone changed our mobile world over night. Last but not least - Don´t be greedy and Collaborate with others. I see a lot of problems in our mobile market here. The roaming costs, the expensive flat rates are all about greedy mobile operators and it really slows down our business potentials in this segment.

Last speaker before lunch was Ulrika Saxon from the Bonnier publications that talked about their project Mag+. Mag+ is Bonniers platform for publishing magazines online and it started before the iPad was known so the goal was not clear. When the iPad was launched they managed to have an app ready. However the app was only a beta and nothing that was ready for large scale production. The attention they got was huge, but they could´t respond to it at the time. This is a crazy project in many ways and its hard to understand how Bonnier does something like this, even though they can afford it. Ulrika's answer was that they knew that they would have to do something and they wanted to be first.

After lunch it was time for Mark Finney – Head of Client sales at the Guardian. The Guardian has grown from being a top 10 paper in England to be the second largest English paper in the World in 7 years. The Guardian has a long history of editorial and political independence. They also has a clear vision to grow. Today they loose 30 M pounds every year, but they are backed up by investors and will continue. The speech was supposed to talk about Open Source, but the focus was on content sharing which is not Open Source. However their model is interesting, they give their data away for free (at least some of it) by using a tier model.

• Tier 1 – Keyless : Free access to Guardian headlines, tags and meta data. No registration or key required. Partners can keep any associated revenue earned using Guardian content on their own applications.
• Tier 2 – Approved : License to publish Guardian articles in full. The Guardian embeds ads, performance tracking and a watermark within the articles it makes available. Partners can keep any associated revenue earned. Registration and access key required.
• Tier 3 – Bespoke : Custom solutions for licensing content and integrating rich applications directly within the Guardian network. It offers sponsorship, licensing, revenue sharing and other custom commercial programs.

Tier 1 is actually something most papers in a way have today by having RSS on their sites. The difference is that they provide an API, so that its more easy to find what you are looking for. I think we will see more of this in the future and it sets focus on something that I have always been talking about. You need to own and control you data, so that is is available to any channel regardless of you needs for print, web, apps etc. A very interesting project that I recommend publishers interested in data sharing to look at is datatables.org and YQL (Yahoo Query Language). This is a standardized way to retrieve data from any source. Thats the way to go if you what your data to be available o anyone, and its also the way to go if you need data from other resources to spice up your own content.

Next Speakers where Jimmie Näslund and Sofia Mirjamsdotter. Jimmy is chief editor of Örnsköldsviks Allehanda a small Swedish paper. Jimmy gave us a very open and personal reflection of how he and his paper did not notice a "huge user driven discussion" going on on the internet that was about a Rape Case in their area. Jimmy and his paper was accessed of being ignorant and passive when the real case was that they did not know. Sofia Mirjamsdotter who works with social media gave us a reflection and she also thought media has a responsibility in bringing online debates to the public by using traditional journalist methods. I must say that i like that thought.

Next speaker was Ove Joanson that described how the Swedish Public radio started to outsource their radio publishing to small independent companies. Ove also thought that the Commercial Radio in Sweden needs to start producing quality radio. Next up was 3 young girls from Berghs School of Communication, that showed us a video of how they see media in 2015. The talked about personal news, the possibility to create your own paper with media from your favorite sources for different areas. The also talked about Advertising that reaches much more segmented groups, so that you can sell the same spot many more times. "This is possible today actually" - Give us a call... :)

A very nice video and but I think we will see a lot of their thought on the market already in 2011, since its all about technical obstacles.

Last out was Sofie Wachtmeister - that worked with sales within TV for many years. She talked about how TV developed their offer and how they tried to newer lose their primarily affair. They only extend it with new things that will have to have its own budget.

This was followed by a debate with people from many Swedish media Houses. Its clear that they all have to develop their offer, but they can never forget their core business:

The News!