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Finnish citizens have had to cope with a tremendeous amount of low quality journalism this past week. Our foreign minister, Mr. Ilkka Kanerva, had sent some text messages to a female dancer who then ran off to the yellow press to release them to public scrutiny. Even the (normally) highly respected Helsingin Sanomat fell in and wrote numerous articles on this matter (then again they are the unofficial horn of the Social Democratic Party – Kanerva is from the National Coalition Party).

The down side of all this is, in my opinion, that this kind of journalism is here to stay. Why? Because of the internet and the media companies’ inability to renew their old, unsustainable business models. Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat are usually competing head to head for the highest ranking website in terms of online visitors and visits on the weekly TNS Metrix ranking.

They are constantly losing ground in the offline world as people are reading news online. Once online, you have to be quick and react immediately to the latest events to be the site that people pass around through e-mail and IM. If you’re slow you’re gone. Well, no you’re not – if you decide to compete on something more sustainable where people actually spend time and enjoy the content. Have you had a look at the Finnish yellow press websites? Their front pages are long as hell – that’s because you need as much coverage on as many items to grasp the interest of a wide, very fragmented audience.

The problem of losing advertising money is not something only the Finnish press is battling with. US saw the biggest plunge in advertising revenue in 50 years. Media companies’ business models are heavily outdated and if they cannot renew their way of thinking and creating value for the customer – we will see many more scandals covered in the hope of a few more eyes grabbed for attention.

Photo by diver227, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with the former supreme administrative court justice Lauri Tarasti last week. He is writing a suggestion on the governance of the Finnish copyright law to the government of Finland and he wanted to hear my opinions on the law based on my work during the renewal of the law in 2005.

What I found interesting about him was the casual manner in which he went about, but he could afford it due to the massive understanding of the governance of issues in the Finnish judicial system. We went about discussing the backgrounds of the law, as one needs to understand the law to some degree before you can suggest who should be in charge of it. I told him about Lessig’s work in the US and how this has affected my thinking of the law and the matter in total. To my surprise when we discussed about the lenght of the current copyright law, he already knew of the Mickey Mouse theory.

However, I must say that our work during the autumn of 2005 was not in vain. A group consisting of four ministers, MO Justice, MO Education, MO Communications, MO Trade and Industry, has been formed to broaden the base on which these important decisions are made. Before, in 2005 more precisely, the sole decision of the law was made by the minister of education, Tanja Karpela – which we can all remember was very one sided and poorly prepared. Therefore I could conclude that we did manage to get something done!

It was a very interesting lunch with Mr Tarasti and he promised me to send the results of his work in May once he gets them ready. I’ll try and post the results as soon as I can.

I wrote an article on social media to HETKY’s (Helsingin tietojenk?§sittely-yhdistys) magazine. The article in itself is quite light and doesn’t dig that much into the possibilities, but shines light on some possibilities and ways how companies have used internet in creating competitive advantage. The image is available in real size scan over here.

I heard some very exciting news just a moment ago; Sony BMG drops DRM!

The fight that I was involved in as well through Olen Rikollinen? -campaign was not carried out in vain. All the largest record labels have finally dropped DRM (or have publicly announced to do so).

This just made my day.

That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams – two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.

It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of – I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.