Great news: Blogging for Sweden’s biggest newspaper!

Woohoo! I got a yes from dn.se – the website of Sweden’s biggest newspaper Dagens Nyheter – so I will be blogging for them during the trip! This is some of the greatest news in a long time and such a relief. Without a media partner we haven’t felt we’ve had a strongpoint towards the sponsors. With only this blog, which is quite anonymous without heavy marketing, we wouldn’t have enough readers to convince anyone fully. But with a blog on a site like dn.se we will have more readers than we can count. Dn.se has around 1,55 million unique visitors every week. How about that…

I went to the meeting at lunch time and afterwards I was just shaking from a combination of excitement and low blood sugar. I’m so excited! This means there’s nothing stopping us now, we have everything we need to start contacting sponsors. And we have a pretty darn heavy card up our sleeve when we do so.

Also, as a journalist, I’m obviously super excited to get to blog for the biggest newspaper! I told the edition manager, whom I had the meeting with today, that one of my biggest goals with reporting from the trip will be to broaden people’s image of Africa. Meanwhile giving a true and honest view of the situation in many countries, I also want to tell the good news. About strong women, people who encourage youth to believe in themselves, about smart inventions, great initatives, entrepreneuring and steps forward. Because this does exist in Africa as well, we just hardly ever read about in the media here. Also, it’s important to me to acknowledge people’s everyday life with joy and struggles. That people in Africa have their own dreams and hopes and projects. That they are people too, just like us. I don’t think that the image a lot of people around here have of Africa, as a starving miserable continent with no light at the end of the tunnel, will help in developing it. On the contrary, I believe that if people really feel a connection with people on the opposite side of the world despite cultural and linguistic differences, it will increase our understanding, respect and solidarity.

The great thing about blogging is that you’re not limited to one type of writing. I can go between reporting on our trip and telling stories about people we meet, I can write journalistic articles and I can share my own personal reflections – and Brian’s – on the things happening around us. And I can tell the stories that normally wouldn’t make it into the news.

So this will be a blog combining both the practical side of the trip, journalistic reports and our personal thoughts on what we encounter along the way. I’ll keep you Swedish readers up to date as soon as it’s time but it will only be just before the trip that dn.se will publish an interview with us and I’ll start blogging, so still a few months away.

Comfortable blogging at my home office that will soon be switched for my mobile office.