Working with the 'competition'

It's a message I keep repeating: I am NOT trying to compete with Svalbardposten.

They do too good a job and I can't possibly pretend to be a "paper of record," since my Norwegian and knowledge of Svalbard are both in their infancy stages. Indeed, I'm trying to cooperate with them as much as possible, something that would no doubt make many "real" alternative newspaper editors cringe. For that reason, I've made a change that limits the amount of English-translated content from their site you can access here.

The "Headlines From Svalbardposten" section originally contained links in each headline that would direct you to the full article at their site, using Google Translate to display it in English. While the wording and grammar were hardly perfect, it was generally enough to understand the gist of the story. But the quirky and/or incorrect wording could result in inadvertently embarrassing phrases that were less than flattering to the newspaper. Google's translation of Solfestuka, for example, is "hellfest." This obviously was not something Svalbardposten wanted, especially given the serious nature of many stories such as fatal snowmobile accidents.

I am continuing to provide the headlines and short summaries - translated by actual humans- with their permission, but with all translation links removed. Anybody can post such links without permission (witness the huge number of blogs, including many prominent ones like Drudge, that are little or nothing but posts from other newspapers), but doing it in a way they approve of is one of the ways I'm trying to avoid stepping on their toes.

You can still link to the paper's main site in Norwegian and those wishing to translate can always use Google Translate on their own, but hopefully with the full knowledge of how imprecise it can be.

By the way, if anyone thinks my "don't make waves" approach to operational stuff is how I generally function as a journalist, no such luck. Some of the things I write will bother people because that's what happens with every newspaper on the planet. If it happens with an article that's fair and accurate, I'll defend it and accept any bad feelings. If there's a mistake, I'll correct it and offer my profuse apologies.