E24.se

» see e24.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Svenska Dagbladet is a Stockholm broadsheet. Aftonbladet is a Stockholm tabloid. They compete for the same readers on most of the paper and they have the same Norwegian owner, Schibsted, which in 2005 decided the two of them should point their business reporters at one shared website instead of two thin ones. It launched on 4 October 2005 under the name Näringsliv24, shortened in practice to N24, and became E24 during the following year.

The brand was not only Swedish. Schibsted ran E24 in Norway, and editions turned up in the Netherlands and Estonia as well, so the Swedish site was one node in something the group was trying to build across its whole footprint. Per Lundsjö ran the Swedish operation as both chief executive and editor from the start. Ownership moved off the two newspapers and onto Schibsted Tillväxtmedier AB, the growth-media arm, which is the corporate step that usually means a product is being measured on its own numbers rather than carried by a parent.

Those numbers did not arrive. On 15 December 2011 Schibsted announced the Swedish edition would close, and the Swedish trade press reported it plainly as an operation that had failed to turn a profit. Around twenty people were affected. Gunilla Asker, the chief executive at Svenska Dagbladet, told reporters the company would present its plans for a new site shortly, which at the time did not yet have a name.

~ the case file ~

~ the last front page ~

The Internet Archive's last capture of a working E24 front page is 28 February 2012. It is a normal working day of a business site. The Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos sits at the top, over a story about Ingvar Kamprad's Inter IKEA putting 712 million kronor into Triton. Further down, Nokia's Stephen Elop photographs himself next to the Lumia 808 PureView. Nothing on the page suggests it is nearly the end.

By 9 May 2012 the address returns a redirect to an empty response. Svenska Dagbladet had launched its replacement business site, Nliv.se, the month before, staffed out of the paper's own economics desk. The section had come home.

~ the view from Ankara ~

Swedish business journalism in 2005 is about as far from my reading list as a thing can get and still be on the open web. I was finishing university in Ankara on a TTNET line, and the financial press I might have opened was in Turkish and printed. What travels here is the shape of the decision rather than the content: a publisher builds a separate digital brand outside its newspapers, gives it six years, and then folds it back into the newspaper it was supposed to replace.

~ where the address goes now ~

Type e24.se today and you land on svd.se/naringsliv, the business section of Svenska Dagbladet. The domain still resolves and still points somewhere useful, carrying none of its own name on the way. E24 is alive in Norway, where e24.no remains one of that country's main business sites, so the brand did not die. Only the Swedish half of it did, in a country where the two papers that built it are still competing.

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