Newspapers

The newspapers here in the UK have been fun to read and experiment with. Back in the states, you typically have to decide between getting the "local" paper like the Boston Globe (the obvious benefit being that you can keep up to date on city politics and regional happenings) or opting for one of the more national papers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc) that has more expansive national coverage. This has always been a tough choice.

Here in the Cambridge, there is no such dilemma-- pretty much all the papers are national (it's a small enough nation), and there are scads of them: the Sun, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Times, and so on. So far we have bought mostly the Times, although every now and then I buy the Guardian just to be contrary. The Times is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, so I am constantly on alert for signs of "Murdochish" influence in the editorial pages and the coverage. Ethan likes the sports pages in the Times, and I have to agree; they do a lovely job covering football and rugby. They also have a very lavish Sunday edition (maybe even a little too lavish-- it almost seems like a different paper, with huge color photographs of this and that).

The Guardian is an interesting paper-- it is very left-leaning, of course, and always focusing on various liberal/progressive causes of one sort or another. It does tend to get a little dry, but every now and then they publish something that really knocks your socks off. In this Tuesday's edition they had an extraordinary article written by Lasantha Wickrematunga, the editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper "The Sunday Leader". This guy suspected that he was going to be a target (the media is under immense pressure from the government there), and sure enough, he was indeed killed, at which point they published a piece he had written just a few days earlier, specifically penned for posthumous publication. Whatever other bad things you can say about the USA, at least we don't have to worry about having our journalists bumped off.