Reading the News

What to do as the local newspaper shrinks away...

Maybe I had an unfair advantage growing up in Fairfax County, Virginia. Just fourteen miles from the Potomac and Washington, DC, the Washington Post was our newspaper. There was also the evening Star, but we took the Post, and I picked up the habit by around eight or so of reading the paper every day, starting with the comics, and I expanded my reading from there. Discovering Art Buchwald’s column at age twelve was a real treat, because by then I had already become a committed MAD magazine reader, and Buchwald’s humor hit the spot at a great time in the 70s. I had a front row seat as Watergate unfolded and the Post reported everything. I grew into a newshound from an early age.

I’ve always read the newspaper, taking a subscription to the local paper as part of settling in wherever: the Atlanta Constitution when I enrolled at Georgia Tech, then the Anniston Star when the Army sent me to Ft McClellan, the Stars and Stripes when I went to Germany, along with subscribing to Der Spiegel, then the Dallas Times Herald after leaving the Army, the Palm Beach Post when I first moved to Florida, then the Tampa Tribune when I settled into Tampa. You get the picture. My morning was not complete without the newspaper. I never bothered much with TV news, not enough depth and too many commercials. NPR news on the car radio was different, being noncommercial. I didn’t have to suffer through advertising, and NPR has no sponsors pulling strings.

Times are changing in the news business, as we’ve seen, and that makes reading the news more challenging. In 2015 Media General sold the Tampa Tribune to the rival St Petersburg Times, which became the Tampa Bay Times. In the past decade I’ve seen the last local newspaper shrink, and shrink, and shrink. The Times prints only on Wednesdays and Sundays, meaning that I have to read the paper on my Android tablet most of the week. The size of the paper itself has been steadily shrinking, and a much smaller newsroom covers sports, local governments and local events. Everything else is newswire stores from the AP.

To the Times’ credit, their coverage of local events and keeping tabs on state and local governments is good. Nobody in Tallahassee or city hall is getting away with anything, and I know what’s happening on the streets of Tampa and St Petersburg. I support that by keeping my subscription, paying the same price for a whole lot less newspaper, because a good, inquisitive press keeps everybody honest.

But this newshound wants to know what’s going on in the rest of the country, and across the world as well. The Tampa Bay Times no longer carries that news, so what do I do? I want to get my news from the pros, researched and fact-checked, not some guy in pajamas posting stuff on Facebook. It turns out that I already had my answer. Since about 2005 I’d been looking at Spiegel Online to keep up with what’s news in Germany. Those guys also post a surprising amount of national news from the USA. I had also been reading the Swiss press, the Neue Züricher Zeiting (NZZ) since 2008. NZZ put up a paywall around 2012, and I switched to the St Gallen Tagblatt, who still post a lot of free (with advertising) news stories.

Long story short, between the Germans at Der Spiegel and the Swiss at Tagblatt, I could keep tabs on what was going on in Florida, the USA, and internationally. The St Gallen newspaper belongs to CH Media, a larger Swiss media company that has news bureaus all over the world. Tagblatt carries a lot of local St Gallen news, but it was the international coverage I read mostly. CH Media also publishes Watson, an online newspaper in German and French, packaged for millennials and younger, mostly wireservice stories but also columnists, analysis, and editorials from CH Media, and it’s all free. No paywalls anywhere. Instead Watson solicits reader donations like public radio. Boiled down, the Germans and Swiss were giving me more and better news coverage of what’s going on in Florida and the USA than the Tampa Bay Times.

My sister faces a similar problem in Eugene, Oregon, because the Register-Guard is also shrinking away to just local news. She signed up for the Washington Post e-newspaper, and for a while was reading the New York Times. I had been reading Der Spiegel since I took my first high school German class in the mid 70s and knew it was a top-tier news source. Der Spiegel’s investigative reporting is about as good as it gets, and they have an English language page, Spiegel International, that carries a selection of translated articles.

If you’re looking for more news than what the local paper provides, or worse yet, the local paper has folded, then it’s time to tap into other reliable sources that are still out there. In English, there’s The Guardian out of the UK, along with Canadian papers like The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. I’m not terribly familiar with them, but they’re worth a look. I’ve been comfortable with the Germans and Swiss for years, because they are more than thorough, and if you don’t know German, Google Translate does a pretty good job. Der Spiegel is employee owned, and CH Media is a family owned company, so no pressure from shareholders or owners like Jeff Bezos.

I also like getting a different view of what’s happening in the USA, a different perspective. Germans tend to lean left, Swiss tend to lean right, and both are fixated on accuracy and telling the story as it is: German thoroughness and Swiss precision. Watson started a news ticker: Das ist nicht normal, (That is not normal), reporting on dodgy things coming from the current US government. I could go on, but I’ll save it for another posting.

Ever since November, German columnists and editorial writers have been nervous, because they’ve seen this movie before in 1932. The Swiss thought things would be good for business, until they faced 39% tariffs, and now the view has changed. I’ll keep reading these guys, because they’re covering stories that never showed in my newspaper or on the radio until problems became crises.