Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.01.2015, Blaðsíða 12

12
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 1 — 2015
Kolabrautin is on
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A Night to Remember
at Harpa Concert Hall
The delight of fine dining is enhanced by the crisp and modern design of Harpa
Concert Hall and the spectacular ocean and mountain view.
The freshest of local produce has an artistic twist on old Italian culinary
traditions on our new à la carte menu. A drink at the bar is the perfect
beginning to a unforgettable evening.
The Year In | Solipsism
But what changed? Icelandic nature is
mostly the same as it was prior to 2008’s
economic collapse (except for the parts
that have been destroyed by dams and al-
uminium smelters, of course), Reykjavík
is still the same city, our towns remain
the same towns, our villages the same
villages, the countryside the same coun-
tryside, and so on. Of course we have seen
a few positive changes that some of the
praise could be credited to—but the most
significant contributing factor, however,
what really changed, was the marketing.
Get inspired!
The "Inspired by Iceland" PR campaign
was launched in the wake of the 2010
Eyjafjallajökull eruption. It eventually
turned into a government-funded insti-
tution called Promote Iceland. Like most
government-funded institutions, Pro-
mote Iceland publishes a detailed annual
report of its activities, the latest of which
covers the year 2013. This report states
that:
“This year, Promote Iceland invited
representatives from about 100 media
outlets to visit the country on organized
media trips. In addition, Promote Iceland
assisted some 800 journalists in organiz-
ing their trips to Iceland, and also worked
closely with the PR offices of different
arts and festival organizers to help out
with such trips.”
This is interesting: while political and
financial powers continue suffocating
Iceland’s media (via withholding funds
and unprecedented interference in gen-
eral), we operate an entire government
institution that flies over at least one hun-
dred foreign journalists every year.
Meanwhile, it is highly unlikely that
Icelandic journalists’ trips abroad num-
ber in the hundreds. The number is cer-
tainly nowhere near the nine hundred
that were either invited or assisted in
visiting Iceland in 2013. I have personally
gone abroad for journalistic reasons five
times over the last six years—four times
to attend film festivals, and once to report
on the then-recently independent Kosovo
and the aftermath of the Bosnian war. I
always had to pay my own expenses, save
for three free nights spent at a Croatian
hotel. This is the reality of many local
journalists—and not just the freelancers.
If the funds simply weren’t there, this
situation would be more acceptable. But,
we certainly seem to have money to go
around for subsidizing journalistic trav-
els. Alas, only in one direction.
Look at us! Look at us!
A nation certainly has some issues if it
keeps yelling: “Look at me, look at me!”
while never bothering to look at others;
if it would rather broadcast foreign TV
shows about fictional Icelandic elves
than fund its own programmes about
other nations.
Indeed, paying others to talk about
ourselves and then loosely translating
their words for our local news seems like
a contradictory media policy. Using those
existing funds to enable some of our own
journalists to go abroad and make real,
lasting connections with the outside
world—not just ones based on empty
flattery—could serve as basis for a much
more dynamic cooperation with the out-
side world, in journalism and other fields.
We seem stuck in a hollow praise-
relationship with the outer world. We ea-
gerly await the next words of praise, and
post them right on our collective Face-
book pages the moment they arrive.
As a nation, we started shooting self-
ies exclusively, way before it was fash-
ionable. And our selfies are meta-selfies,
photos of other people’s portraits of our-
selves.
This development been ongoing since
the crash of 2008. During that time, the
number of PR specialists in Iceland has
kept growing, as the number of actual,
employed journalists steadily decreases.
This is, in part, the work of a government
that employs PR personnel for almost ev-
ery ministry, a government that prefers to
pay people for controlling the news that
is being reported rather than help jour-
nalists come by the necessary funds and
resources to actually report the news.
Of course, a government that’s aller-
gic to criticism welcomes this develop-
ment. But for the society it serves, it is less
than thrilling. Surely, a steady stream of
foreign journalists to the country, bal-
anced with a steady stream of Icelandic
journalists reporting on and seeking the
viewpoint of the outside world, would
create the sort of dynamic dialogue that
we are sorely missing.
Finally: as the title indicates, this ar-
ticle is a sequel. Four and a half years ago,
23 foreign journalists were invited here
to report on Icelandic musicians. At the
time, I penned an article that seems wor-
thy of a revisit:
Inspired by
Foreign Journalists
The Cannes Film Festival, Roskilde and
Glastonbury. Those festivals have at least
two things in common: all are among the
most famous and prestigious cultural
festivals in the world—and no Icelandic
newspaper sent a correspondent to any of
them in 2010.
We all know the reasons—the local
media suffers from budget cuts, while
fewer and fewer journalists can afford to
fund such trips out of pocket. This is just
one of the luxuries that we had to forego
post-collapse, right? Yet, the problem
runs deeper. There was rarely money—
or ambition—to be found for such trips
during the boom years. There is little ac-
knowledgement of how productive jour-
nalistic trips abroad can be as important
for the Icelandic media as the translation
of world literature is for our literature,
because without it, local media and local
literature will quickly become stale.
One possible solution is to offer state
grants for projects or trips too expen-
sive for the newspapers to fund on their
own—but such a fund is nowhere to be
found in Iceland (such journalism funds,
both state run and private, are quite com-
mon in Europe). The money for such a
fund nevertheless seems to be there, as
23 journalists were recently sponsored
by the government to go abroad for a
concert. Those 23 journalists work for es-
teemed publications and I have no doubt
that they are good journalists.
But none of those journalists are
Iceland ic. They came from esteemed in-
ternational media outlets such as Dan-
marks Radio, Politiken, Sunday Times,
Dazed & Confused, NME and Die Welt,
and they attended concerts with Hjal-
talín and the National Symphony Or-
chestra (fourteen journalists) and For a
Minor Reflection’s album release show
(nine journalists). Most of those journal-
ists came from big media companies, me-
dia companies that ought to be able to pay
themselves for visits abroad, unlike their
Icelandic counterparts.
This initiative would have made me
happy if it signified a newfound generosi-
ty towards foreigners, but on the contrary
it‘s really a symptom of a deeply rooted
apathy about the outside world. Our in-
terest in the outside world seems non-
existent, except when the outside world
is talking about us. As long as it‘s positive.
If not, we put our heads in the sand and
speak of envy and mean foreigners who
pick on the little island.
This has nothing to do with the love
of music or journalists—on the contrary it
suggests that artists mostly have value as
long as they attract tourists and journal-
ists only have value if they can be used for
promotional purposes.
This play, then, reaches surreal
heights when detailed articles (yet usu-
ally devoid of criticism) appear in the
Icelandic media about the trips foreign
journalists took in the country to speak
about Icelandic bands. By now, I don’t
only have to read the foreign media to get
proper coverage of foreign culture—I also
have to read it to get proper coverage of
Icelandic artists.
The latter article originally ap-
peared in Icelandic in the now defunct
website Kistan on July 27, 2010.
Words by Ásgeir H. Ingólfsson
Artwork by Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir
Those are random headlines I spotted on Icelandic news
sites the day I wrote this article. Both stories report on
articles that appeared in the foreign media. On any given
day over the past five years or so, I probably could have
found similar headlines. Judging by the Icelandic media,
foreigners are simply going mad for Iceland, at an un-
prece dented rate.
Selfie
Nation
Inspired by Foreign
Journalists, Part II
“A few reasons why
Iceland is the best
place in the world”
“The untamed,
distant and cool
Iceland”
ANALYSIS