Sunday Papers in Zürich

In Zürich, two major newspapers Tages Anzeiger and NZZ (Neuer Zürich Zeitung) are competing against each other. When I was taking the “Living in Zürich” course provided by the city, my teacher told her students that NZZ is considered slightly right and traditional. Their sponsors are mainly financial institutes and car manufacturers. That means, due to the financial turmoil and less budget for advertisement, they are struggling to survive and just had to let people go. Tages Anzeiger also had to lay off 80 employees last week.

I think the downfall of the newspaper industry was already foreseeable from many years ago. In 2004, my friend who was writing for the Guardian back then told me that people don’t just like to read papers any more. The simpler you write, the more likely that people read. So she had hard time reporting complicated criminal cases with elementary words. That’s why tabloid papers are rooting everywhere these days. Have people become less intellectual? Or they are so intellectual that they need a break from sophisticated papers? Do people take news for granted, now that they can read up-to-date news on Internet for free? Will newspapers eventually disappear?

Since Peter and I never have time to read papers during the weekday, we subscribe to Sunday papers. Peter works for the publisher of Tages Anzeiger, so we get free Sunday paper called SonntagsZeitung. Since our friend Hanna works for NZZ, we also subscribe to NZZ am Sonntag. I personally find the contents and layout of NZZ am Sonntag much better and sophisticated, whereas SonntagsZeitung has a very very bad taste in choosing topics for articles and photos. I also don’t like that SonntagsZeitung LOVE to insult people. In the style section, they compared bad dresser and good dresser like in tabloid papers. That shows how low they had to go down on their knees to capture the audience. And frankly speaking, it’s pathetic that their best dresser choices are not even the best at all. If they show the page to the NYT style columnist, they will ask if these pages are from the 90’s. SonntagsZeitung also wrote on the prime second page that their rival NZZ is financially doing bad and that they started charging its staff for the water in the office. So what? This kind of article is sorely for the sake of the company and its investors and obviously not for the readers. I don’t want to feel unpleasant and waste my precious Sunday morning reading unnecessary insults.

Well, on the other hand, I like the advertisement posters for SonntagsZeitung. This illustration series is called “Insight Stories” by Advico Young & Rubicam. Very well thought, indeed.