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Many months ago Sweden’s newspaper of record, “Dagens Nyheter” decided to take on its local Stockholm rival “Svenska Dagbladet” and switched to a tabloid format. The reason both papers did so was apparently to make it easier to read them during the morning commute.

Reading on the Stockholm subway, originally uploaded by polnamara

There were warnings that the switch would dumb-down the news, if nothing else by reducing the amount of space for stories. While “Svenska Dagbladet” seems to have made the transition well, “Dagens Nyheter” did not. The front page now carries one major story that is usually an exclusive, and not necessarily the most important news of the day. Around it are scattered a few short items, but unlike “Svenska Dagbladet” you really can’t get an overview of the major news by looking at the front page of “Dagens Nyheter”.

The other apparent blunder was taking the excellent weather page from the last page of the main section, and moving it to the last page of the culture section. That meant taking the paper apart every morning to get to the all-important weather. That might seem trivial, but given the difficulty in taking apart “Dagens Nyheter’s” new format, it was very irritating. So irritating in fact, that after a few months the newspaper restored the weather to the last page of the main section.

Unfortunately starting last week the newspaper has added a new “improvement” in the wrong direction. They’ve redone the weather page (right) and made it utterly incomprehensible.

Generally such revamps are to add new technology, color, satellite information, etc. Whatever “Dagens Nyheter” has done, and why, it is now very difficult to get a grip on the weather. Especially irritating is the removal of the information that provided a quick forecast for 12 regions around the country over a five day period.

They’ve also reduced the international forecasts. Instead of alternating between major world cities and major tourist destinations on alternate days, they now provide half as many of each every day. That means the only American forecasts are now for New York, Miami and Los Angeles. No more San Francisco, Chicago, Las Vegas.

It is very hard to see how the new page is an improvement in any way. One explanation may just be that it is cheaper to print.

But the newspaper has just given subscribers another reason to switch to “Svenska Dagbladet”.

The old easy-to-read multi-day weather map