Newsmill

» see newsmill.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Newsmill opened to the public on 3 September 2008 with a proposition that sounded better in 2008 than it does now: take the op-ed page away from the editors and hand it to whoever wants to write. P.M. Nilsson ran it as chief executive and carried the legal publisher responsibility himself, with Sakine Madon and Patrik Kronqvist on the editorial side. The owner was Bonnier Tidskrifter, which is to say one of the largest media families in the Nordics was funding an experiment in not needing them.

The mechanic was simple. Somebody posts an argument about a news story, other people post arguments back, and the site sorts by heat rather than by byline. A cabinet minister and a twenty-two-year-old with a grievance got the identical layout. For a couple of years this was genuinely where Swedish political fights started, and the mainstream papers found themselves reporting on things that had been written on a website by people they had never commissioned.

There was a price list underneath it. Fifty thousand kronor a week bought guaranteed publication, which meant the open floor had a paid lane running down the middle of it. Nobody involved hid this, and it is the detail that separates Newsmill from the pure user-generated sites it got compared to.

I have no memory of this at all, which is the honest answer for a Swedish-language debate site that ran between 2008 and 2013. Those were my working years in Ankara, and the argument I was following in that window was the Turkish one, on Turkish forums. Newsmill is something I read about in the archive.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who actually wrote there ~

The criticism arrived early and never left. The trade magazine Journalisten and the politician Ali Esbati made versions of the same complaint: whatever the intent, what Newsmill built in practice was another gathering point on the internet for reactionaries with time on their hands. The site's defenders pointed at the range of people publishing there, which was real and wide.

Both things were true, which is the usual outcome when you remove the gatekeeper and keep the megaphone. The 2009 nomination for Innovator of the Year in Swedish journalism got questioned on exactly these grounds.

~ the comments go first ~

In September 2012 Bonnier switched off the comment function. For a site whose entire reason to exist was the argument underneath the article, closing the comments was closing most of the product. The blogger Cornucopia wrote it up at the time as what it looked like, which was a retreat.

~ the summer break ~

Nilsson had already left in October 2012. Bonnier Tidskrifter handed the site over in January 2013 to Nyhetsbolaget, the company behind TV4's news, and Newsmill spent its last months attached to a television newsroom that was itself being wound down. On 12 June 2013 it posted that it was taking a summer break. That was the last thing it ever posted, and the closure came bundled with the end of TV4 Nyheterna that summer.

On 10 February 2014 Dagens Industri bought the name. Newsmill did not get its site back; it was folded into DI Opinion, the opinion section of a Bonnier business daily, with Peter Fellman as editor and P.M. Nilsson already installed there as political editor. A project built to take the op-ed page away from the editors ended up as a subheading on one.

Type newsmill.se today and you land on Di.se. The domain still works. It just points at the establishment.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »