Hello All;

Few months ago I subscribed to the TagesAnzeiger. The daily newspaper is okay (informative, quite heavy to read but high quality, although I still have to get used to the looong articles), but the weekly Saturday magazine "DAS MAGAZIN" - ai ai ai!
Instead of any cheerful stories, there are exclusively heavy and tough articles. So virtually no articles/reports about the good things in life, the things to enjoy, to go to, to experience, etc. Which means that in the weekend, there's nothing to read about lifestyle, travel, cooking, outdoors/sports etc etc.

For as long as I can remember the cover is dark (mostly black), and the subjects are always heavy and tough to digest:
- Story about Christoph Blocher, anti-immigrant right-wing politician
- Story about a guy who almost died when he had most of his body tattood in Samoa?
- etc etc

So...I wrote a note to the editors of Das Magazin to get it of my chest. Surprisingly I got a response..of which I will paste here some bits:
It's so good to read..I just have to share it here :

I was suprised not to receive any newspaper last Saturday - thought that I was put on a black list haha. But that appeared to be a mistake from the post coincidentally.

Anyway...what are your experiences with Swiss newspapers - anybody know a good alternative for the weekends? I lived in the UK and really liked the Saturday&Sunday editions of Times with all its sections!
Maybe here in Switzerland the Sonntagszeitung is a good alternative?

Look forward to hear your reactions and views!

Hey that's interesting, had a similar discussion with someone from Swissinfo in Bern who used to work for a UK daily broadsheet. He said he's constantly pushing for 'lifestyle' issues, but there's resistance so long as there's no competition. In a way I damn his eyes but I also would like to see a 'Sunday Supplement' style news magazine which mixes the present news topics with some froth. Like agony aunts, sex advice, etc. ha! ha!

I don't suppose anyone ever bothers writing in to these people, so I guess your man there was quite pleased someone made the effort.

There is the NZZ am Sontag, which is suprisingly un-NZZ like. It sometimes has some very interesting "lifestyle" articles. I must admit to only having borrowed copies so I don't know it all that well...

Good to see that you received such a positive response! Its true, Switzerland does seem to resist change, but it is creeping slowly in

Well done Vince for writing! And it's such an insight.

I've heard this 'self-fulfilling prophecy' a number of times before from various Swiss people - "we are such Bünzlis". (There is no direct English translation of Bünzli - stodgy, boring, conventional is the nearest.)

The Swiss (the German-speaking Swiss at least) know it, don't like it, but won't change it either, and their 'editorial policy' actively maintains it. Zwingli always gets blamed too. (And "never under pressure to make money" is so Zwingli-Swiss.)

A nation gets the newspapers it deserves, and the traditional Swiss press give the customer what they want. Das 'Tagi-Magi' and the Swiss press reflect their readers' desire to be realistic - to indentify and solve present problems. While the American view (the other extreme) looks positively to the future. It's realistic v. optimistic.

The Tages-Anzeiger did have its layout revamped about 10 years ago to gasps and great sucking in of air. The NZZ does occassional have a single, small colour picture on its front page. The TA is, by the way left of centre, and the NZZ to the right.

NZZ am Sonntag was designed by an English company.

Of course there is always 20 Minutes and the Blick...

Maybe I am just a bit strange, but I hate lifestyle sections. I also find Tages Anzeiger fairly light and parochial. If you are looking for a newspaper that is still lighter buy Blick -- Zürich's tabloid -- or checkout your regional newspaper, which will undoubtedly have shorter articles. I live in Aargau and their region newspaper is available in different editions from Bern and Solothurn to the Limmattal in the Zürich area. As someone who prefers the New York Times, I do not find the NZZ overly arduous to read or terribly plain. It might be to the right in the Swiss sense of things, but political positioning is different here on the continent than it is in the Anglo-American world. Again, this could be because I skipped over every fashion, society, and lifestyle section either the NYT or NZZ carried. On Sundays Sontagszeitung is lighter than fluff -- I actually find it relatively useless -- while the NZZ am Sonntag reads like Tagi during the week and is the better of the two.

In terms of magazines, why not check out Schweiz Illustrierte -- they are "Näher bei den Stars" ( http://www.schweizer-illustrierte.ch/ ). I actually find Swiss Zeitschriften a little too local for my tastes sometimes, but they are not that longwinded. However, I get the feeling that you want something in between these two extremes. If that is so, check out "Facts" [ http://www.facts.ch ].

Check out the NZZ today. A bit more than a single, small color photo. The new layout is rather similar to the previous one...

My Guardian reading friends bemoan the rise and rise of "lifestyle" pages in the Saturday mag and The Observer mag is derided as complete tosh by those earnest lefty types, I guess they would love Das Magazin approach...

Swiss-French papers wise, Le Temps is a pretty decent paper, very much along the lines of The Independent with an excellent cultural outlook and good relations with various qualitz European papers (El Mundo, Le Monde, Guardian, etc). The weekly L'Hebdo is alright too, a New Statesman light really.

I did find "Das Magazin" miss leading once. There's a issue they feature some articles about Hong Kong (a year ago or so), but without reading the content, I already can tell that 90% of the photo they published are NOT in/from Hong Kong, I can tell by the way people dress, and the letter/language appear in the photos is totally miss-leading, I feel insulted immediately to know that my "place of origin" are being presented in a wrong, and negative way, but I didn't do anything... Good that I can finally at least say it here...

this phenomenon has actually been in Switzerland for quite a while, you see people are putting up wrong Chinese word (some of them is upside down, some of them is flipped) on T-Shirt, Furniture....everywhere that make them look "hip", there's one time I even saw UBS use cheap Chinese writing on their poster...haha! I dont understand.