Information editorial meeting. All rights reserved.On a Monday afternoon in September, a group of journalists sat down in the editorial meeting room of the Danish daily newspaper Information's Copenhagen headquarters, a white building that was liberated from the Nazis by the Danish resistance movement in May 1945, when Germany lost the war and Information was transformed from an illegal paper for the resistance into an official daily newspaper.
On the agenda for the meeting was the usual planning of an edition of Information, but this group was different from your typical mostly-white, middle-class representatives of most Danish journalists. Other than a few Information employees to facilitate the meeting and the process, this editorial group consisted exclusively of journalists who were also refugees. The largest group of them were more or less recent arrivals in Denmark from Syria; others from Afghanistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Kenya and Thailand.
On Friday 9 October the result was published: a 48-page edition of the newspaper consisting entirely of articles, editorials, columns, op-eds, essays and reviews edited and written by refugees. The texts ranged from a first-hand report about the selling of Palmyra cultural heritage in the Turkish border town Gaziantep to a poem from a Syrian prisoner of war. From an in-depth investigation of the consequences for women of the fact that two thirds of Europe's Mediterranean refugees are men, to a personal review of Magnus Wennman's photo series of Syrian children sleeping on their refugee routes, written by a 22-year old who herself walked much of the way from Afghanistan to Denmark at the age of seven.
