Vestkusten

Vestkusten was an American newspaper, originally in Swedish, and published in California from 1887 to 2007. It was founded as Ebenezer, a church news bulletin by Augustana Lutheran pastor Johannes Telleen, but it soon changed focus and became a newspaper after he gave it over to editor and typesetter Alrik G. Spencer.^[1][2] For most of its run, it was a weekly newspaper published in San Francisco. It was primarily a local newspaper for Swedish Americans in northern California, but also contained news from the Swedish press in the form of special reports.

Swedish-Americans Ernst Skarstedt and Alexander Olsson [sv] took over the newspaper in 1894, increasing its popularity.^[3] After Olsson's death in the 1950s, it was run by writer Karin Person for some time; the association Friends of Vestkusten was founded in 1968 to keep it afloat when Person began to struggle.^[4] More recently, the paper was owned and operated for many years by Swedish-American Barbro Sachs-Osher, who purchased it in 1991.^[3]

It has been digitized and is searchable on the Internet under CDNC – the California Digital Newspaper Collection – which also contains digitized versions of many other newspapers.^[3] The CDNC invites volunteers to proofread to correct conversion errors from scanning and digitizing.

At the time of its closure, Vestkusten was incorporated into Nordstjernan, a newspaper with an editorial office in New York but with part of its circulation printed in California.^[5]