I reckon people have already started registering, 30 mins after interview aired! We’d lost some members compared to Ana’s first post when I last checked, but now we’re up 13.
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I loved the idea, I’m already writing here for them, one of the things I love about Norway is Black Metal Bands and Art.
I don’t know if NRK radio is geoblocked, but if it is, here’s a link to an mp3 file of @marit_la 's interview from this morning, for any Scandinavian speakers who may be blocked from playing the recording on NRK’s website.
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Hurraaaaaay! 
I still don’t understand a word of Norwegian, but we’re up 24 new members from Norway in the last 24 hours, so I would say @marit_la’s postcard (and interview) have been a success! Well done!
Let’s keep it up and write to a few more of these — hopefully we’ll manage to get some more attention from the Norwegian media until the end of the month! 
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I had no problem to listen to the program from Sweden.
Great, good to know!
I love this idea! Will send out a bunch soon as I get home from work this evening!
Sent out to
Ringerikes Blad
Allers
Dagbladet
P4
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The signal is good? I’m a broadcasting lover.
I listened to the online stream only.
Beautiful and very smart initiative. What a better way to catch someone’s attention that the way we use to communicate here? (also, not everyday in the office you find a Postcard from somewhere else in the world).
I’ve just added a digital culture magazine, SYNogSEGN. I’m sending the postcard today, although it is already September.
This month new target hasn’t been defined yet.
I may have an analysis on which countries can be the best candidates for this type of initiative (countries big enough to have many more members but have a few, but also rich enough and accessible enough to not be part of the “rare country” cathegory).
Should I post it here?
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Ok, so. I know nobody asked me but since I saw this initiative I’ve been thinking on what could we do to decide -in the fairest way possible- which countries include as targets to promote Postcrossing.
I undestand that for now it has been @meiadeleite and the team’s decision and by no mean I want to imply that nothing in this was unfair or that the countries were wrong selected (quite the opposite). I just… I thought we could do something with al the data Postcrossing has. I don’t want to imposse anything, I just want to present an idea.
Ok. How do we start?
First of all, we have to define the countries that are absolutely out of the list. And those are rare countries/territories that fall in this cathegory of “rare” because: A) postage is expensive, cards are expensive and in general people on the country can not face right now this hobby, or B) this are small and quite unaccessible territories with low population and very long “postal time” to everywhere or unaccessible because of politics/conflicts.
In this territories, there would be little use to promote Postcrossing, the problems are other. Out of the list go (just for example): Nauru, Niger, Kenia, North Korea…
Now. My idea is to focus on countries with low members that also have a good economy, ie: with people that can actually spend money on something that is not of necessity. And for that I am pairing the list of countries from Postcrossing with the GDP of each country.
I used the GDP list from here. This is just orientative, I just needed to use the “position of richness” not the actual value of the GDP.
One think we have to take in mind is that the number of members alone is not a good indicative of a country. Take Aland* islands, for example: There are 37 members, which is not much. But the total population is 26 711 people. That means that the 0,1385% of the total population of the region is IN Postcrossing. Basically, 0,14%. More than enough for such a small country. Aland Islands is not in our list.
*Apologies, I don’t have the symbol for Aº.
Then, how do we decide when a country/territory has “enough” members? We need a limit, a threshold.
Since the last time #DearJournalist was made we had 
Norway, Norway will define our threshold.
At the moment, there are 1299 members, of 5,3 million habitants. So, 0,0245% of all Norwegians are in Postcrossing.
We’ll say 0,025%.
That’s our limit.
That means that, from the countries with the higher GDP, we’ll need to find the ones with a % of postcrossers lower than 0,025%.
One last thing we need. Because PC is as much about members as it is about quantity of postcards, the most frequent countries are also out of the list no matter if they are past the threshold. Why do I say this?
Well… take USA, for example. There are 72 000 members of PC in the USA. But with 327.000.000 people, that’s just the 0,022%. Less than Norway!
Of course, we know that receiving postcards from the USA is not uncommon and the initiative is well known there, so this rule does not aply here.
What are these countries? The ones that appear in the stats section of postcrossing as the ones with the most members: Russia, Taiwan, China, USA, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Czechia, UK, Finland, France, Japan, Turkey.
Now that everything is settled, I’ll start the list. I’ve made the list with the first 15 countries of the GDP ranking. I will extend it later if people are interested.
#1 
Qatar.
50 members, for 2,7 million people. 0,00185%
On the list.
#2 
Macau
872 members. 0,138%
Not on the list.
#3 
Luxembourg
302 members make 0,0497 (~0,05%).
Not on the list.
#4 
Singapore.
3214 members. 0,0588%
Not on the list
#5 
Brunei
74 members 0,017%
On the list, but not a priority.
#6 
Ireland
1312 members. 0,027%
Not on the list.
#7 
UAE.
317 members. 0,0033%
: On the list.
#8 
Kuwait.
11 members 0,00027%
: On the list (in bold)
#9 
Switzerland
3500 members. 0,04%
Not on the list.
#10 
San marino
NO MEMBERS Habitants: ~33.800
On the list.
#11 Norway. Done. 
#12 
Hong Kong
10 000 members. 0,135%
Not on the List
#13 
United States Not on the list
#14 
Iceland. Done
#15 
The Nedtherlands Not on the list.
That’s it for now. This took me quite some time, so you may not like the idea but please don’t be rude in the comments.
I undestand that probably GDP is not the fairest method to base this on. But, as I see it, there’s no perfect method and this one is quite simple but does the work.
And you may think that the countries that made it to the “top” list are not of your interest. But the idea here is to expand Postcrossing as much as possible and, until postcards and stamps will somehow turn free for everyone, money will continue to be an obstacle for this initiative. At least this way we can identify the countries that have a problem of information reather than one of wealth,
Also, precisely because these countries are rich, there must be a group of expats that flew to find work there. That is an extra tool to start with. And some of this countries have quite an industry in bussiness and tech, which makes English a frequently used language.
Again, it is not perfect. But if you’ve read until here: thank you.
If this works, I will continue the work and expand the list. Until next time, keep writing postcards. 
:
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Lots of work!
If we leave out islam/arab countries of your top15 there is only San Marino left. A Travel Mode destination not worth promoting with high priority.
Unless one of us is able to get an item on Al-Jazeera tv or radio Arab or English ofcourse - would be fabulous for the region.
My suggestion is that you leave out the factor money income poor rich - in your list. What list will we get then?
Some so called poor countries have reasonable postage system. Like India - developping quickly.
Personally I do not need a system of ranking which country to promote.
Norway & Iceland check.
Would like to see Namibia Uruguay Mexico India Nepal in the spotlights.
But everyone can spread the word wherever whenever.
Hope that this will be continued.
Possibly promoting Travel Mode might be a good plan as well. For many it is still not a clear thing.
Hi Lucía!
You have some good ideas that are more or less aligned with the improvised method we came up to choose the next country, so I’m glad to have your input and suggestions here. 
We added some extra considerations when preparing the list, such as how “efficient” postal services are (to the best of our knowledge), and the current status of mail deliveries to/from there (based on the Postal Monitor), but the principle is the same. We had a territory picked up for the next one, but when I contacted a member from there who works at the postal service, it turned out mail deliveries there were a big mess at the moment due to the moving of their sorting center to a new one… so it wasn’t the best time to do this.
At the moment I’m a bit overwhelmed with the World Postcard Day preparations to give this topic the proper attention it deserves though… 
So I propose putting this on hold for now, and continue the Dear Journalist project next month — hopefully with your help too!
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It’s OK. World Postcard Day is Postcrossing BIG day, it takes a lot of work before the 1st October begins.
I’m glad to hear this is not completely cancelled. I must say I didn’t think about taking into account the eficiency of postal services and avaliability, but it is quite important. Specially after reading about the territory that is currently changing the sortin center (I don’t even want to picture out the mess…).
Looking forward to start again with Dear Journalist next month (after, you know… the big day). And I’m here to help with anything I can.
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Hi everyone! Sorry for leaving you hanging — it took us a bit longer than expected to get back on track after the World Postcard Day.
So the job at hand would be to decide on the next country for a new Dear Journalist challenge. Paulo and I filtered the list of possible destinations by GDP per capita, how well the postal services work, postcrossers per capita, information on the Postal Monitor, etc and came to a list of a few countries we think might be good candidates.
It’s tricky to decide on a strict criteria to pick a country, so we thought instead we’d put it to a vote!
Here are our candidates — please pick 3 that you think would be interesting to poke in the coming months:
- Aruba
- Cyprus
- Faroe Islands
- Guam
- Israel
- Oman
- Qatar
- United Arab Emirates
- Uruguay
0 voters
We’ll close the poll at the end of the week and start the next Dear Journalist campaign in November, with the winning country.
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Thank you everyone who voted! Here’s the new challenge:
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A post was merged into an existing topic: QUESTION: Is the “Dear Journalist” challenge dead? May I offer to bring it back to life?