Goda nyheter:
Swedish news media on the Web

Now, however, the World Wide Web has made available more Swedish news than the average Swede or Swedophile can handle. Even some English-language sources are available for those Swedish-Americans whose knowledge of Swedish is limited to mispronouncing smörgåsbord. Several newspapers and other news sources have set up shop on the Web, and the question is becoming not where to find the news, but what is the most effective way to access it.

Fortunately, two heroes of the Swedish Web have set up comprehensive guides to Swedish news on the Web. Thanks to these tools, you don't have to keep track of the many Web sites available; they do the work for you:

Svenska nyheter

This list is produced by Magnus Stensmo, a graduate student at the Salk Institute in California. This is not a high-tech list with a lot of graphics; it is a simple, categorized list of links with a number of useful annotations. I use this list as a bookmark list when I want to check the latest news.

The really useful part of Stensmo's list is that he provides links not just to the main page of a newspaper's site; he'll link you to particluar pages within a site for the fastest possible access to the news. For example, he has a main link to Svenska Dagbladet, but he also links to the individual portions of today's paper you might be interested in: Ettan, I korthet, Ledare, Kultur. Börskommentar, -rapporter. City. He also notes the time of day that each publication is updated online.

In addition to daily newspapers, Svenska nyheter lists a number of business, political, and technical and trade journals that provide some news content.

A companion page called Swedish News lists English-language sources of news from Sweden.

All in all, this is the single most useful list of links for news from Sweden.

Swedish Massmedia

This page is part of a much more extensive site called The Swedish Page, maintained by Nikos Markovits. This list includes a number of media-related sites not included in Svenska nyheter, and The Swedish Page is a well-organized catalog of other important sites in Sweden.

The strength of Swedish Massmedia is that it tries to be more comprehensive - it includes a lot of media-related sites that might not have any news, but which might nonetheless be of interest to kulturCHOCK! readers. There are, for example, lot of links to Web sites maintained by small, local newspapers that are not included in Svenska Nyheter because they don't actually contain news updates.

Swedish Massmedia also includes links to several other media-related Swedish and non-Swedish Internet resources, such as student media and media education in Sweden.

kulturCHOCK!s redaktion cannot resist the urge to list its own favorites among the many news-oriented sites from Sweden. In the interest of brevity, the Top Ten list has been cut down to a mere Top Five.

Fem-i-topp: kulturCHOCK!s top five Swedish Media sites

Svenska Dagbladet

Updated at midnight Swedish time. Two nice features: one is that you can link directly to the first page, "Ettan" and see 4 or five headlines with links to the main stories of the day. If you have missed a day or two, the previous 7 days' headlines are a little further down on the same page. The other is that there is a brief page called "I korthet" that gives you about a page full of short news items. Useful for printing and sharing with others offline.

Göteborgs Posten

Updated at 9:30 am Swedish time. Well-organized, with an index page for each of the past 7 days. At the top, 4 or 5 healines with links to stories. Below, the rest of the stories categorized by the different parts of the newspaper.

Swedish Television's Rapport Broadcast

Swedish Television provides this transcript of its 4 pm news broadcast each day. If there is late-breaking news, this would be the place to check it out. You'll even see pictures from the day's broadcast. Updated by 5 pm Swedish time, which means it is available mid-morning in most of the US.

SVT's Text-TV

For the uninitiated, Text-TV is a special channel on Swedish TV that broadcasts written news items. They have created a Web interface. It is still a little buggy, but it works well for the most part. These items come right from the newswire, so this is really the place to go for the the most up-to-the-minute news.

Aftonbladet

One of Sweden's fabulous evening papers. The place to go for stories of the "Poor Pernilla treated badly by the authorities" or "Absentee landlords leave tenants in misery" school of journalism. It makes our list because it shows the pop-culture side of Sweden, and because they wrote a nice review of kulturCHOCK!

-David Curle