Christmas at Sydsvenskan

Southern Swedish daily newspaper Sydsvenskan is doing something very different this Christmas. Twenty ten-year-olds will be joining the news desk and deciding the contents for a majority of the newspaper for the Christmas Eve issue. Nearly all the sections will have children as editors. 

"The world is big for ten-year-olds, and they're still extremely inquisitive," says Emma Leijnse, project manager for the special Christmas Eve edition. "We want the paper to reflect reality from their perspective."

All sections of the paper except for the Personligt section will have content for which the kids have been editors with two child editors per section. The Personligt section will instead have a birthday profile of a ten-year-old.

"Those of us working at the paper will write, photograph and edit based on what the children want us to do," says Leijnse. "But the children will be heavily involved during the work period. They've prepared questions, and many have tagged along during different interviews, so they know how an interview is done."

The young editors have worked with the newspaper since the end of November. At the beginning, it was mostly about finding the right topics and now at the end of the project they are deciding how the material should be presented together with the editors and designers.

It will be clear what material has come from the children.

"The ten-year-olds will be presented in the first spread of the paper," says Leijnse. "And of course the children will receive byline photos for each of their respective sections."

For Leijnse, it's a treat to work with the children. "It's really nice, they've truly been a fountain of ideas," she says. "A lot has to do with what they think about during the day."

Working with the kids requires some special handling. "You see that it's easy to control them, so you need to give them plenty of room to think for themselves," says Leijnse. "Obviously you also need to explain that there are certain limits, for example that the national news section isn't going to interview soccer superstar Zlatan Ibrahimovic."

What's most fun with the project is seeing reality through the children's perspective, Leijnse says, and that they think their perspective is so important.

The project could expand in the future to include other groups. "This way of working could easily be adapted to any group of people," says Leijnse. "For example retired people, IT nerds or hospital janitors. It could be incredibly interesting."

The idea for the special Christmas Eve issue of Sydsvenskan came from culture editor Rakel Chukri.