"After selling the company, and working since 1995 on Norwegian and international seafood news, the need to do something else became more pressing, not least because covering the seafood industry requires a massive amount of traveling,” Olsen said.

“Though I’m sad to be leaving, my main concern was about steering my life toward an increasing degree of regularity and predictability,” he said.

Olsen praised the contribution of owners NHST, and said he has been thrilled to see ideas he and Hernes conceived taking shape and that IntraFish is growing and developing.

The arrival of new technology made it easy and cheap to get early editions of IntraFish up and running as a Norwegian and English newsletter put together on computer and distributed by fax.

A year after debuting on the Internet in both Norwegian and English, international awareness of IntraFish had spread and achieved profitability very quickly, attracting interest as an investment target in what turned out to be the start of the dot-com age.

In the past 12 years, while revenue has grown 30 percent annually, Olsen said IntraFish has given the seafood press new topics to write about and looked for innovative, new angles while always striving for accuracy.

“When we started the seafood press was introvert and inaccessible for people outside the industry as was the industry itself,” Olsen said.

The billion-dollar industry was mostly concerned with catches, arguing and debating net dimensions and quotas, though some still believe the fisheries industry is subsidized, he said.

Olsen said he will miss IntraFish colleagues and contacts in a very open industry, where patient sources have taught journalists and readers an enormous amount about the background to their complicated work environments.

“We have been extremely fortunate, and without our sources and supporters we wouldn’t have been anything,” Olsen said.

Olsen says he doesn’t want to throw away the education the industry has given him and plans to work on many seafood news items at NRK.

“I have been in a continual learning process, and have seen and experienced things in the world during these last 12 years that journalists do not normally get to experience in a whole lifetime. It’s been fantastic,” Olsen said.

Founder waves farewell to IntraFish