Magnus Bormark, a long-time Norwegian rock guitarist, said his band is used to releasing music with little promotion. So nothing could have prepared him for the onslaught of attention since his band Gåte was chosen to represent Norway at this year's Eurovision Song Contest.
Bollmark said the phone never stops ringing. Not just calls from mainstream media reporters, but also from independent bloggers, YouTubers and podcast hosts who provide non-stop Eurovision gossip, behind-the-scenes drama and competition news to Eurovision enthusiasts. He says he's receiving a phone call. .
Once a year, casual Eurovision viewers can watch artists representing 37 countries compete in the world's most-watched cultural event. But for true fans, Eurovision is a year-round pop music extravaganza, with winners determined by viewer votes and a jury of music industry experts, so the fan media hype is all about those artists. will help increase your visibility.
The rise of websites and social media accounts dedicated to Eurovision news has increased the scale and influence of non-traditional media organizations such as fan sites, podcasts, newsletters, new video formats and publications specializing in niche interests. It follows broader trends in growing media.
A report released last year by the Reuters Institute for Journalism found that users of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat pay more attention to social media personalities, influencers and celebrities than journalists for news.
“Some people are sitting in their bedrooms obsessively watching Eurovision, and all of a sudden they have 40,000 followers,” Bollmark said.
Wiwibloggs, one of the most followed Eurovision news sites, was founded by William Lee Adams, a Vietnamese-American journalist working for the BBC.
“Fan media has been kind of holding their breath all year, because they know this topic is under-covered,” Adams said. The site's YouTube channel received more than 20 million views last year. “This is the World Cup of music, the Olympics on steroids, and it's worth watching.”
A lot has changed since Adams founded the site 15 years ago. At the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest in Baku, Azerbaijan, Ms. Adams, along with a friend wearing hot pink pants and a tight white shirt, was among the few representatives of traditional media outlets in the media room. He said he was one of those who were not.
“Things snowballed from there,” he said. Currently, Wiwibloggs has a volunteer staff of over 40 writers, editors, videographers and graphic designers from 30 countries.
This year, around 300 fan media members representing around 200 publications, social media channels and podcasts have signed up to cover the Eurovision final in Malmö, Sweden. An additional 200 fan journalists will have access to the tournament's online media room, according to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which oversees the event. More than 750 journalists from traditional media are expected to participate, including one reporter from the New York Times.
Alecia Lucas, a Eurovision commentator from the Washington, D.C., area, started her YouTube channel in 2015 as a way to find people who are passionate about Eurovision, but she said this isn't easy for Americans. As the audience has grown, so has the role of bloggers in setting the tone for conversations about artists, she said.
“We will start beating the drum faster than EBU to bring Eurovision back into the zeitgeist and highlight noteworthy moments,” said Lucas, who uses the name Alecia Michel on his YouTube channel said. She records content at 6 a.m. before her daughter wakes up and edits the videos after finishing her day job of handling union communications.
Eurovision commentator Gabe Milne uses his time outside of his day job at London City Hall to create videos for his YouTube channel. “I often work there for eight or nine hours, go home, and then do six or seven hours of research to get everything ready,” he says. Compared to past years, “we're seeing a lot more professional content,” he said.
However, fan media has largely distanced itself from the topic that mainstream media is heavily reporting on: the campaign to exclude Israel from the competition due to the rising number of civilian deaths in Gaza.
“We're not journalists,” says Tom Davitt, an Irish physiotherapist who records Eurovision YouTube videos on nights and weekends. “We dabble in this kind of thing because we're not even amateur journalists, we're just amateur content creators. We just aren't trained for it.”
While mainstream media reporters tend to observe competition from an unbiased standpoint, many fan media outlets do not aim to be neutral. When USA Today hired a Taylor Swift reporter who calls herself Taylor Swift, the question arose: “Can fans be objective?” Can a non-fan understand and cover this subject well enough?
Charlie Beckett, director of the London School of Economics journalism think tank, said objectivity was not the goal of Eurovision.
“The whole point of Eurovision is that it's incredibly biased based on nationality and favorite singers,” Beckett said. The increase in the number of fan media sites reflects the growing hype surrounding Eurovision, even though it has been nearly 70 years since its first edition. “It seems to survive any fashion reversal,” he says.
Mr Lucas, who is from the Washington DC area, said the mainstream media reported Eurovision as a circus, but that Eurovision was now more mainstream than people gave it credit for. “Yeah, it's a little camping,” she said. “But you can't say Katy Perry's halftime show wasn't camp either.”