Sweden has a very strange press tradition. There are no morning newspapers on public holidays.

In America we get our newspapers delivered daily, 365 days a year. The Brits have a somewhat strange variation on that…ordinary newspapers have a Sunday cousin. The “Times” has the “Sunday Times”, the “Independent” the “Sunday Independent”, the “Guardian” turns into the “Observer”. Presumably that means you don’t have to subscribe to the Sunday paper if you don’t want to. Or you can subscribe to several Sunday papers without having to take out full 7 days a week subscriptions.

Here in Sweden, not only are Sunday newspapers no thicker than any other day of the week (and certainly no colored comics section), for some reason there is no subscription paper on Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Midsummer, All Saints Day, Christmas and Boxing Day, and all the other public holidays. Like Epiphany, which is today.

There are some newspapers today, just not the ones you pay a monthly subscription for. The afternoon tabloids, which are always sold over-the-counter, are there if you go to the store and pay for them. In my early years in Sweden, I’m pretty sure even those papers didn’t come out on holidays. Instead there were special one off papers in the stores, with names like “Sportsbladet”.

One wonders what is the point? It can’t be to give journalists a day off on the holiday, because they have to work on the holiday to produce the paper that comes out the day after the holiday. So they would seem to get the day before the holiday off. Presumably some staff gets to stay home, and the newspaper saves a bunch of paper costs, at the same time that it is obviously losing lots of advertising that would be at its most effective, with a readership that has time to read the whole paper instead of skim it before work.

A few years ago, when Anders Melbourne was editor of “Dagens Nyheter” he promised to end the practice, and move toward 365 day newspapers. He actually did deliver a couple of holiday editions before he moved on to a new job. His successor immediately withdrew the reform.

Strangely, the morning papers keep publishing on the Internet before, during, and after holidays, so journalists are there 365 days a year. I suppose the idea is that in this modern Web age we can get our news from the Net, and we don’t need the papers.

But that is a dangerous position, since it raises the question of whether the Net is replacing paper newspapers anyway. They shouldn’t want to go down that road.

Moreover, until the new paper computers arrive (and one Swedish newspaper is already experimenting with them), nothing beats leafing through a paper newspaper. You can’t peruse a computer lying in bed.