How a newspaper should look

Indeed! It is the passing of an age. One shivers to think of the Timmerman flat with foreign furniture in the form of colourful FAZ’es piled under the windows. I suspect he might cancel the subscription now that things have come to this, though! Ah, good times.

Very interesting. I must seek out a book on the history of newspaper design.

Indeed. The development of the FAZ (which remains, tellingly, by far the best, really the only readable German newspaper) in the last years is one of steady decline, and, as you so aptly put it, giving in to the Spirit of the Age. First, they tempered with the Fraktur font, eliminating the diffrentiation between long and round “s” which is really one of the charms of broken fonts. Then they introduced red for some pointers on the title page. Next they completely removed the Fraktur from the title page (an indication of the state of our culture, when even supposedly learned people are no longer able or willing to read the typeface [let alone the handwriting] in which virtually all books printed before 1941 [when Hitler banned it for being “Jewish”] are set – we have cut ourselves off from our entire written history). And now they have introduced photographs on the front page, when it has always been the hallmark, and also, I would say from an economic point of view, the USP, of the FAZ to only have text on the frontpage. Really sad beyond words. Of course at each steps there were waves of protest, but they adamantly stuck to their market analyses. Of course, when the photographs were introduced, they promised us that they would each time convey some important insight which could better be expressed this way than in the words, but we now have come so far that the pictures are no better than in the cheapest tabloids, mere “eye catchers”, often with no relation whatsoever to the actual articles, and mostly not offering any insight at all. Also, the reporting, and even the orthography and still more depressingly the grammar which had always been impeccable, have become decidedly poorer. Whenever I lived abroad, I used to hold up the FAZ as an example of what a real newspaper should be. Well, not anymore. I really would love to end my subscription, if only there were some decent alternative. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Speaking of a less interesting world, any comment on the fact that there is now one less monarchy in the world? I haven’t spent much time thinking about the Nepalese monarchy (perhaps you have), but if the Maoists were against ’em, then I was for ’em.