LETTER FROM SWEDEN
It’s such a spectacular twist that we thought it was an April Fool’s first. While all Swedish newspapers predicted the imminent disappearance of the news site Newsletter (pronounced “bubble-tine”), after only three and a half months of existence, Andrew Rosenthal, former head of the editorial page of the New York Times, was announced as its new editor.
A joke ? Not really. In an interview with the American magazine Vanity Fair, on April 7, the person concerned confirms: yes, he accepted the post, even if his experience of Sweden is limited to what he saw of it during trips to Stockholm, when he was director of the office of the Associated Press (AP) agency in Moscow, in the 1980s. As for his knowledge of the press of the Scandinavian kingdom, it does not exceed “What he learned while watching The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo (the film adaptation of the first volume of the trilogy Millennium) “, specifies the article.
Taunts
In normal times, the arrival of Mr. Rosenthal, 65, – who will work remotely from his home in Montclair, New Jersey – would have been greeted with enthusiasm, in a country of almost boundless admiration for everything. which comes from the United States. On the contrary, this recruitment aroused only misunderstanding and mockery, especially as Lydia Polgreen, former editorial director at New York Times, then editor-in-chief of Huffington Post, revealed on Twitter that “All the former editors of the NYT have been contacted for this position on LinkedIn “.
According to the Swedish daily Expressen, they were reportedly approached by the American recruitment company ECA Partners, which is headed by one of the members of the management of Newsletter, Swedish entrepreneur Atta Tarki. Not afraid of the ridiculous, the job posting presented the site as “One of the most successful newspaper launches in modern Swedish history”.
To understand the deception, we have to go back. In November 2020, more precisely. The small world of the Swedish press then bustles with rumors: a new medium is about to be created. Several editorialists, all right-wing conservative, quit their posts in the major newspapers of the kingdom and confirm in the wake of joining the editorial staff of the site Newsletter, launched on December 22.
At its head: journalist Paulina Neuding, 39, and to her credit, several editor-in-chief positions in various right-wing media. On December 5, she published a final column, in the journal Svenska Dagbladet, entitled: “The country that no longer exists. »She talks about her parents, Polish Jews, who arrived as refugees in 1968 in Sweden. “Idyllic”, today eaten away by “Insecurity and violence”.
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