It all started on 2nd October 2013, the day Daily Scandinavian was launched. The online publication was established to promote Scandinavian destinations, attractions, and issues regarding culture, including fine art/music, architecture, food & drink, business, news, and views. Now, ten years after its founding, Daily Scandinavian has evolved to an essential and visible resource for our community with over 2.500 articles.
At this moment, I am delighted to highlight ten milestones and highlights from the past 10 years. And quoting from the first editorial I published in 2013, because that’s exactly how I felt and what I’m feeling right now: I am about to share wonderful Scandinavia with my readers, filled with emotion and enthusiasm.
Ten Milestones and Highlights in 10 years
1. Starting out alone
2. Authors and photographers
3. Readers and reviewers
4. Acknowledgements
5. Serving the hospitality community
6. Special Issues and columns
7. Global visibility
8. Fine Arts/Music
9. Scandinavian explorers
10. Expat in Scandinavia
1. Starting out alone
It all started on 2nd October 2013 with my very first published article on Daily Scandinavian, Gliding Through Sweden’s Heartland. When Daily Scandinavian was founded, I wanted to leverage my long experience and insight with the Norwegian (and international) trade press. I had a desire to create a publication to make the exchange of Scandinavian insight freely available to all, regardless of geography. Our statistics soon proved that about 33% of our readers was US citizens, 27% was Scandinavians, 18,5% was living in UK and the rest was spread throughout the world.
My aim was to publish one article every weekday (hence Daily Scandinavian). I had retired from my job as a PR advisor and the main reason was to keep my second language, English, alive and my brain fresh and updated. Plus, I must admit, have some fun. I have done so now for 10 years – and feel I’m still going strong.
Daily Scandinavian Celebrating a Decade of Publishing: Ten Milestones and Highlight in Ten Years – continue reading.
2. Authors and photographers
First of all, I’d like to express my deepest congratulations and appreciation to our supporting writers and photographers. Since our second year, Daily Scandinavian has adopted editorial supporters and technical advisors as co-working mechanisms. Their dedication and efforts were instrumental in Daily Scandinavian’s success. Unfortunately, I cannot name everybody here (this article is long enough as is), but I want to give honor to a selected group of people who has contributed to the quality of our content – representing all others – not mentioned, but not forgotten.
The loyal contributing writers I want to highlight are (in alphabetical order):
Karoline Gore
Karoline is a freelance writer from Stoke on Trent in the UK who left the corporate grind when she started a family and has never looked back. She enjoys contributing to a range of online publications on the topics that are important to her. You can read one of her articles, Debunking Myths About Scandinavians by clicking the link.
Ainsley Lawrence
Ainsley is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest. Ainsley is interested in better living. through technology and education. She is frequently lost in a good book. You can read one of her articles Nordic Necessities: Essential Car Maintenance for Scandinavian Winters by clicking the link.
Shawn Mack
Shawn is a content writer who offers ghostwriting, copy-writing, and blogging services. His educational background in business and technical field has given him a broad base from which to approach many topics. You can read one of his articles Health and Medicine in the Viking Scandinavia by licking the link.
Nadine Westwood.
Nadine is a registered dietitian, travel blogger & fitness lover. In her spare time, she helps save stray animals. Nadine really does enjoy sharing her fitness journey with others who might need help with weight loss or finding a stress reliever. You can read one of her articles 4 Great Reasons to Move to Scandinavia from the USA (and 5 Practical Tips) by clicking the link.
Photographers who have contributed to the high quality of image material are (in alphabetic order):
Jon Arne Foss
Jon Arne is an experienced landscape photographer, based in Oslo, Norway. His pursuit of motifs has taken him around Scandinavia for well over two decades now. His talent for rare captures of amazing light and fleeting atmosphere imbue his portfolio with a sense of the majestic and the bold.
Terje Rakke
In 2001, after working with the international agency Image Bank / Getty Images for 13 years, as partner in Image Bank Norway and as an international photographer, Norwegian photographer Terje Rakke established his own photo agency. Its specialty is photography from Norway and Scandinavia. You can read more about him here.
Lasse Tur
Lasse is one of the Daily Scandinavians’ excellent photographers. In 2010 his first book “Oslo seen from above”, one of a series of aerial photo books brightened his career even further. Now, he has a new book project with one of Norway largest publishers. You can read more about Pictures From Above by clicking the link.
3. Readers and reviewers
Since 2015, I’m obliged to our readers and reviewers. During the past ten years, Daily Scandinavian has published over 2.500 articles submitted by over 100 writers. It’s our worldwide authors’ high-quality contributions that fundamentally nourish Daily Scandinavian and support our rapid increase in submissions.
Accompanied by increased submissions, inevitably, more burdens were placed on the reviewers. It’s their professional, unbiased, and timely evaluations and comments that helped improve the manuscripts to convey a better message to our broad readership.
And I thank our readers for keeping a very close eye on Daily Scandinavian and the many constructive suggestions for Daily Scandinavian to improve its quality or impact, or who has evidence of promoting Daily Scandinavian in public/social media/conferences/webinars/workshops/forums, and published articles/books/presentations.
I have always had an eye for photography, although I am an amateur myself. In 2015, Fotografiska in Stockholm celebrated it’s 5 years’ anniversary. We published an article and since then we’ve kept a close relationship. We were invited to interview co-founder Janne Bromann in 2016.
Daily Scandinavian Celebrating a Decade of Publishing: Ten Milestones and Highlight in Ten Years – continue reading.
4. Technical advisors
In November 2016, Daily Scandinavian launched a new design. It featured a whole new look with mobile-first responsive design, and a new focus on sharing with our readers Scandinavian active lifestyles, destinations, accommodation, attractions, history, arts and music, architecture, fitness, recipes and more. Our web-designer and webmaster at that time, Amir Hussain, did an excellent job. Our webmaster through the years, Federico Maltese, has been a valuable resource and solved many technical challenges. He helps small business with optimizing IT systems, increase productivity and reduce costs with focus on IT Security.
5. Acknowledgements
Our hard work was not overlooked. In 2018, Daily Scandinavian was awarded the 3rd ranking award on “Top 50 Scandinavia Travel Blog” by Feedspot. In 2019, it was proclaimed that we were accepted on the Expertido’s list of the 25 Best Scandinavia Travel Blogs, and in 2020, we were contacted by Corporate Live Wire, announcing that we’ve been awarded the Prestige Award of the year. “The judges were impressed with your personal touch, consistency of reviews and community feel. The passion for what you do really comes across and I hope this achievement brings more success in 2021,” said Rocky Singh at CLW.
6. Serving the hospitality community
To highlight the important topics, events, and people in the hospitality community, we have reviewed hotels all over Scandinavia, given honest comments on both positive and negative issues.
We’re in particular proud of being honored guests of several Classic Norway hotels, the Thief and Raddison Plaza in Oslo and the Well in Kolbotn outside Oslo. I will use this opportunity to thank hotel managers Stephen Meinich-Bache (Classic Norway Hotels), Robert Holan (The Thief), Tarje Hellebust (Raddisson Plaza) and André Julseth (The Well – now managing director at Sommerro hotel in Oslo) respectively for their kind collaboration.
In 2021, during the covid pandemic, Stephen Meinich-Bache navigated his chain during touch times.
6. Global visibility
Daily Scandinavian has gained high visibility all around the world. We’ve received comments from 65 countries, and downloads from more than 100 countries and were widely spread through the world’s major travel portals and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn).
Here are just two examples of recent comments:
Message Body: “I read an article you wrote about this cheese. We are a small goat-dairy in Texas and my husband tasted that cheese a long time ago and since we have a creamery and do make cheese we decided to make Gjetost. We’ve tried twice and it hasn’t turned out well. We tried once in a crockpot with whole goat milk, and this week we tried fresh whey after making Swiss cheese and added cream towards the end. Do you know of any resources we can use to make this wonderful cheese successfully?”
When we wrote about Pål Ross who created the most beautiful villa in Sweden, he commented:
“Thank you very much for your very nice article! I just read it and everything was right. I’m going happily to link to it from our website!
It may be interesting for you to know that we just two weeks ago were awarded both gold and silver price in ADCs international architecture competition. If you look into the website, you can see we awarded for the same project that was featured in Grand Designs.”
Daily Scandinavian Celebrating a Decade of Publishing: Ten Milestones and Highlight in Ten Years – continue reading.
7. Special Issues and columns
With over 2,500 articles, Daily Scandinavian has become a resource for many of our visitors. Some claim that the publication is like a living encyclopedia. E. g. If you use the search function and type ‘Vikings’, you’ll have 120 Viking-related articles to choose from. We know that some articles are more visited than others, from 88,000 views to 500, the average being about 7,000.
Based on this information, in 2021, we decided to launch a new category, Scandinavian Explorers (see below).
8. Fine Arts/Music
Fine arts/music is a topic I personally like to share. However, I wanted to give our articles a more professional touch. Earlier this year, I met Anne Marit Muri at an art exhibition in Oslo. We talked about art, her career, interests and Daily Scandinavian and we immediately felt we were on the same wavelength.
Anne Marit is a former editor of, among others, Magasinet Kunst, and has written reports on art and culture for a number of years.
She is the author and initiator of the book, Kunstnerliv, portraits of 19 contemporary artists, which was published in 2018, voted the year’s most beautiful art book in 2019 by Grafill. She is also the author of the book, Kåre Tveter – Det gåtefulle lyset, Svalbard, which was published in autumn 2022, by the publisher Utenfor Allfarvei in Harstad.
You can read her article A Norwegian Artist’s Fusion of Old and New Times by clicking the link.
Muri is educated at the University of Oslo and Bergen. She is currently working on a master’s degree in media development, under the auspices of Oslo Met, in addition to developing new book projects and is a writer for several magazines.
Now, she is not only a regular writer on fine arts for Daily Scandinavian, but also a partner for future strategies.
9. Scandinavian Explorers
In our series Scandinavian Explorers, we present not only famous explorers from the Viking age to our present time, but also fascinating and exotic destinations for modern Scandinavian ‘explorers’. We have recently visited Bordeaux in France, Tallin in Lithuania, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is on our bucket list.
Our Bordeaux article will be published in the course of this month.
10. Expat in Scandinavia
At a conference in 2022, I met Soumitra Bhattacharya from India. He moved to Norway 21 years ago to work with one of the largest IT corporations in Norway and has been here since.
Examining Daily Scandinavian, he told me, “I wish I had this information long time ago. Expats in Scandinavia is a market for you.”
I am not always easy to convince, but this time it screamed Eureka! We have just launched a new series “Expat in Scandinavia” and are now in the process of preparing a twice a month newsletter for the target group. Soumitra is from time to time advising me on important issues.
10 years
Ten years is definitely a short period in communication history, but what has been done in this period could perhaps change a new generation of influencers. Looking back at the past decade, the whole Daily Scandinavian team can proudly say that we have tried our utmost and wholeheartedly to serve the people in hospitality and tourism. Scandinavian co-operation has firm traditions in politics, the economy, and culture. The region plays steadily a more important role in European and international collaboration and aims at creating a strong Nordic community in a strong Europe.
I believe we have achieved our primary goal. We have made successful progress, some of which I could not have even dreamed of 10 years ago!
I am confident that Daily Scandinavian and Expat in Scandinavia will be able to open new horizons in the future and inspire us to say, “Look, we have a mission!”.
Thank you for reading Daily Scandinavian Celebrating a Decade of Publishing: Ten Milestones and Highlight in Ten Years to the very end.
Tor Kjolberg
Editor-in-Chief