The Newspapers

I gave up buying a newspaper on a regular basis some while ago when my subscription to the Telegraph ran out and I decided to read the news on-line for a while and see how this compared with the real thing. Now I must make it clear, my interests do not extend to the so-called "celebs", to pop stars or to reality TV shows. Nor do I have that much interest in sport and none in all the sporting scandals. I have been to one football match in my life, in Sweden, because my business host at the time thought it appropriate for an English guest!
The advantage of reading the news on line is that I have set up RSS feeds from those papers that I prefer to read, and can then scan down the headings to see if there is anything of interest. I don't feel that I have to read it all from cover to cover because I've paid good money for the paper and must get my value out of it! I tend to miss the crosswords and Mrs EP misses the Sudoko, but as a book of these costs about the same as a daily paper, there is no problem. So now, I just buy one of the Saturday papers which has a TV supplement for the week, and so save a few hundred pounds a year!

Reading the news on-line also has the advantage that if something happens in another country and you have an interest in the matter, you can invariably find a local English language paper to provide more details. With Germany and the EU being in the news at the moment, one can read various German viewpoints in Der Spiegel which produces an on-line version in English.

Would I go back to buying a Newspaper on a regular basis? It seems unlikely unless one should revert to being just that, a newspaper. It would need to contain real factual, hopefully unbiased, news from around the world and confine issues such as the winner of "Big Brother" to not more than a small paragraph at the bottom of page five.

And as I've mentioned Der Spiegel, I thought that I should quote this from yesterday's on line edition
"The German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said that only fools learned from their own mistakes -- he preferred to learn from the mistakes of others. At the moment, no politician or adviser in Europe has bothered to learn the lessons of the Argentine or Asian debt crises. Indeed, in Europe, they aren't even learning from their own mistakes."

Bismark had something there!