I had barely posted my latest blog post about how Expressen had decided to stop hosting blogs, before I read on DagensMedia.se that the other Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet is doing the same. Aftonbladet has two types of blogs – blogs by the editorial staff and blogs that readers publish. It is the latter group that is being shut down because they are unprofitable.
Reader blogs will be taken offline on June 30, so bloggers will have to move their content elsewhere if they want to keep it online. As noted in my previous post, Aftonbladet recently added the ability to export the content to WordPress.
In other words, three large Swedish newspapers have either decided to shut down our outsource the hosting of readers blogs, in the last three months. What will that mean for blogging in Sweden? Not much, I guess. There are plenty of good options and I would suspect that many of the active “newspaper bloggers” will continue to blog, either take their content to a new platform or start fresh with a new blog.