Swedish royalty magazine “Queen” ceases publication

On Monday I bought the latest issue of the Swedish royalty magazine Queen and, flipping through it, I wondered to myself how long this magazine would survive. Only a few days later the answer came in the shape of the news that this was the last issue.
Queen was founded in 2008 by Roger Lundgren, who also became its first editor-in-chief. He wanted it to be a more serious magazine than those already on the Swedish market and succeeded well in creating a mix of interesting articles about royals past and present.
Sadly, the owner, Bonnier tidskrifter, soon decided to replace Roger Lundgren with Pamela Andersson as editor-in-chief. Under her editorship the quality of the magazine plummeted, and interesting articles by good writers, such as Christopher O’Regan on court life at Drottningholm in the days of Gustaf III or the work of the Royal Collection, were replaced by such peripheral things as the wife of a friend of King Carl Gustaf showing the magazine her wardrobe and Prince Carl Philip’s ex-girlfriend talking about the organisation “Borneo Orangutang Survival”, while articles on makeup, clothes, bags and shoes were allowed to fill a large part of the magazine, thus making it very similar to just another glossy women’s magazine which there are already plenty of on the market.
In the latest issue there is a lot of nonsense such as “Eugenie is the new princess of scandals” and a photo spread of various royals or semi-royals wearing blue clothes, while the only articles of some interest are Roger Lundgren’s interviews with Queen Silvia and ex-Queen Anne-Marie.
For some time it has seemed the owners and the new editor wanted to turn Queen into another irrelevant gossip magazine. And now they have decided to take that step fully and replace Queen with a biweekly gossip magazine called simply S.
It was a very good initiative which was taken by Roger Lundgren in establishing Queen two years ago and it is a pity that the owners chose to destroy the project in the way they did.