In Broken English

Okay, I admit. It’s no secret anymore so I’ll just come out and say it. Yes, I would not say no if Mads Mikkelsen asked me to marry him.

Damn, is he good looking! I’m glued to the telly every Thursday night when Rejseholdet (Mordkommissionen pŒ svenska) is on.

Of course, the possibility (or risk) of Mikkelsen asking me to marry him isn’t that high but anyway. It feels good to come out
In this week’s episode, Fischer (Mads Mikkelsen) and la Cour (Lars Brygmann) goes to a summer house toghether with Fischer’s family. Their idyllic vacation is interupted by a murder in the surrounding where the local police needs assistance from Rejseholdet… *wooow* Can ahrdly wait!

Elsker dig for evigt, Susanne Bier’s dogma film from last year is a great movie! It’s warm, it’s human, it’s realistic but not boring. I feel completely exhausted after seeing it.

Found 52 reviews of Elsker dig for evigt/Open Hearts on the Movie Review Query Engine.

Found a really interesting article in Der Standard today: Erinnerung an die Zukunft which discussed the issue about digital archiving. How are we supposed to store all digital information that is being created every hour on the Internet? The American Internet Archive saves 400 megabyte every day! That’s 20 kilometres of shelf space!

The question about format is also interesting when it comes to digital information. You need machines and software to access the material and what happens in 200 years from now? Will software and machine be able to handle old files like that?

I also started thinking about my own homepage when I read that the average homepage exists only 50 days. steffanie dot net has existed since March 1998 but I actually have very few backups of my own material. Some are to be found here.

I was interviewed by Metro, a newspaper distributed free in the Stockholm subway system, this week. The journalist had found me on BookCrossing and wanted to know how it worked and why I joined. I explained I followed a link from Barken, thought it was a good idea and signed up. I told the reporter I hadn’t released any books yet but that I was planning to release “The reader” by Bernhard Schlink. A picture of me, reading in front of an approaching train, was also taken.

I didn’t know when the article was to be published and since I normally travel by bus and not by subway, I would probably miss it. Anyway, three days later I was going (by subway) to a girl in my class to work on a project and grabbed a Metro while running up the stairs to the platform, sat down on the train and started going through the paper.

And there I was. Looking like a moron of course and I realised again why I prefer being behind the camera. Luckily, none of my classmates had noticed my newspaper-debut so the day went by quietly. When I got home, I had two messages on my answeringmachine… the first one was from SR International, a multilanguage Swedish radio channel, and the second one was from the local tv-station. They both wanted to intview me about BookCrossing…

Is this my fifteen minutes of fame? Then I better enjoy them, if that’s all I’m gonna get…

“Swedish journalists don’t cover wars very good. Half of them haven’t done military service and the rest are women”

This is what our journalism teacher said when we were discussion the possibility of a war against Iraq.

I found it interesting since:
a) I have done military service
b) I am a woman

But I didn’t get myself involved in any discussion with him, I am probably just an exception that proves the rule. Watching the news today (Aktuellt in SVT at 21.00) I learned that 500 journalists are participating in a military training program in the US which is preparing them for covering the war on Iraq.

These journalists will be given the opportunity to follow the American troops all the way to the front line. But of course there will be restrictions, they cannot write anything they like. They must keep to certain rules, for example not writing about on-going missions or revealing too much details.

This might be something for the Swedish Army to copy?! Military training camps for journalists. I could be the drill sergent
BTW, I saw the movie “No Man’s Land” yesterday and decided never to get involved in tv-journalism. Especially not from war zones.

Went to hearing with the title “Is the openness threatened?” at the university today (referring to the principle of public access to official records, called “offentlighetsprincipen” in Swedish). We were supposed to, it’s a part of our course at the moment, but I would probably had gone anyway because the subject interests me. They had managed to gather a competent panel and the discussion had two focuses: a new law regarding how information should be stored used by courts might make it more difficult for journalists and citizens to gain access. Why and is that really good? Shouldn’t authorities try to be as open as possible?

The second issue was paragraph 7:16 in the Swedish Official Secrets Act which is very unprecise and ambiguous written causing trouble for journalists trying to get access to diffrent kinds of documents. I find these subjects very interersting but to tell the truth, they lost me somewhere between the paragraphs. Suddenly it became very complicated for someone without expertise knowledge.

I actually have some, expertise knowledge I mean, so I should be well prepared. I studied a part of this problem before for an article I wrote, namely the secrecy regarding photos of individual persons in official registers, for example the passport-photo register or the driver license photo register. Today, anyone can get hold of someone elses photo from either one of these registers, you just need to know when the person is borned and his or her personal code number (which also is public information if you call the national registration). The Justicedepartment is investigating how this can be changed without damaging the “offentlighetsprincipen” and that was my story.

Does anything of this makes sense? I just realized how difficult it is to explain. Especially in English. Anyway… The hearing gave a glimpse of the complexity of these questions. I wish I knew more about law, so that I would be able to follow the discussion better…

I returned from Tallinn this morning after spending four days in the cold and snowy Estonian capital. I travelled with Jenny and Daniel, two of my classmates, and the trip was a part of our journalism class we’re taking now and the goal was to learn under what conditions a foreign correspondent works. It should result in an article on a burning Estonian issue and I found several interesting things to write about. The problem is I feel so insecure. Who am I to think I know something about Estonia after spending four days in Tallinn? It feels so… presumptuous. I mean, there must be alot of people who know a whole lot more about Estonia then I do. I feel like an arrogant foreigner who sweeps in, skims through a couple of books, makes a couple of interviews, makes some photos and then goes back home to write a story about how real life is in Estonia.
I asked myself the very same questions after having lived in Austria for 10 months. “Do I really know enough to analyze the Austrian political situation? There must be several people who are more suited for this then me”. And I knew a whole lot more about Austrian politics back then then I know about Estonian politics now…

Is it just bad confidence or the Gretchenfrage of journalism?

“Journalists are people who write about things they know nothing about for people who cannot read” is sometimes said to be the characteristic of journalism. I always wanted to be another sort of journalist, but does that mean I must get a masters degree in every subject before I can open my mouth?

The only fair way to do this, as I see it now, is to start from myself and my own experiences in Tallinn. I cannot pretend to to be someone else then who I am. Hopefully it leads to a result as well…