Jón Trausti Sigurðarson

This Saturday, Denmark’s oldest newspaper, Berlinske Tidende, ran a story it had been working on for months.The topic: the Icelandic fisheries industry. The conclusion: Iceland is an oligarchy.

The Grapevine’s guide to sounding Icelandic, one word at a time For a thousand years Icelandic has had its own Icelandic names for various places and geographic locations visited by Icelanders or discussed in the numerous sagas and other literature written in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries. Some of these names have stuck and are still in use. Gothenburg is always called Gautaborg in Icelandic, Copenhagen is Kaupmannahöfn. You catch our drift.

Media research in the past decade has established that feedback online, first from clicks, then from social media interaction, has formed the agenda-setting of editorial boards across the globe. This has been going on for so long now that it now looks like the editorial staff of most media outlets in Iceland at least, don’t even comprehend any more that the agenda-setting —  what stories to emphasise, what discourse to uphold —  is their job.