Aftonbladet.se is the first Swedish newspaper on the internet
It's the 25th of August, 1994, and Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet takes a big step when they add their culture section to the world wide web. This is the first newspaper in Sweden to publish online.
Aftonbladet.se 1994.
JMK, the institute for journalism and communications at the Stockholm university, have been wanting to test out journalism online for a while with a real newspaper. But they are rebuffed at every door until Bo Hedin, then head of news at Aftonbladet, manages to convince his board in the spring of 1994.
It takes a lot of work to make the first web version work, but during that fall the editorial staff can take over after first having to set up their own internet connection and learn enough to make the pages themselves. During the following spring they also start publishing daily news online, which is one of the first ever news services on the web.
Soon one of Sweden's most visited web sites
How many readers they have from the start is hard to say, since there was no good measurement tools back then. But soon Aftonbladet is one of Sweden's largest web pages, and in 2010 they hit five million visitors during one week.
See our interview with Joakim Jardenberg below (in Swedish only). He worked with aftonbladet.se and tells about his time at the paper.
