Ergo to celebrate its centenary with a ball at Östgöta nation

The Uppsala Student Union newspaper Ergo was started by a group of students in 1924 as a cultural journal focusing on Uppsala and student life. In the early days it often featured long essays on topical issues. For any readers who don’t remember their Latin lessons, the name Ergo comes from the Latin word for ‘therefore’.

Over the years, Ergo has had a number of well-known contributors and editors. In the very first issue, Karin Boye, already an established poet, contributed a poem and several more of her poems were subsequently first published in Ergo. Another well-known name first appeared in Ergo in the mid-1980s, in 1985 to be exact. This was when Jan Berglin (then Lindström) introduced his big-nosed cartoon figures with their observations on contemporary life.

How does it feel to be editor-in-chief of a one-hundred-year-old publication that has had famous contributors such as Karin Boye, Anders Ehnmark, Anna Lindh, Jan Berglin, Ola Larsmo? A list that could be much longer.

“It feels great! Though of course theirs are large shoes to fill, so it does put a bit of pressure on. Mostly it feels good to have the opportunity to preserve and develop a publication that carries such a weight of cultural history as the newspaper Ergo does,” says Lovisa Sjöström Johansson, editor-in-chief of Ergo.

Sold to Uppsala Student Union

In 1940, Ergo was sold to Uppsala Student Union by the people who had started the newspaper. A major reason for the sale was to enable students doing national service during the Second World War to stay in touch with the student union, Uppsala University and the student nations.

In the 1950s, Ergo came to focus more simply on news, investigating and analysing the academic world from a student perspective.

During the 2020 spring semester, Ergo made the transition from a physical newspaper to an online publication with the address ergo.nu. It remains independent of the union’s board, the opposition and Uppsala University.

Do you have any plans for Ergo’s future that you can share with us?

“We have quite a lot of plans for Ergo’s development actually, in purely organisational terms, but I’m afraid I can’t talk about any of that yet... ‘Watch our space,’ is all I say! There are fun things coming up.” 

Well, right now – in autumn 2024 – it’s time for the newspaper’s centenary. How are you going to celebrate a century of newspaper publishing?

“There will be a jubilee ball on 19 October, at Östgöta nation. During the two weeks leading up to Saturday 19 October, we will be publishing lots of interesting decade-by-decade retrospectives in our social media (@TidningenErgo), as well as new articles on the theme ‘Ergo at 100’! We’re looking forward to looking back on – and celebrating – a whole century of student journalism together with students and colleagues.” 

Anders Berndt