By: Mark Fitzgerald Like the protagonist in "Foreign Affair," Tom Waits' dreamy ode to the pleasures of short-term romances while traveling abroad, I often develop deep crushes outside the borders of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The object of my affection, though, is always a newspaper. Like a summer love, a paper read for a week or so in its native environment can overwhelm with its charm while obscuring the shortcomings that time inevitably reveals.
So I've fallen head over heels in love with the Irish Independent in Ireland, Nuestro Diario in Guatemala, Clar?n in Buenos Aires, Milenio in Mexico City, and some unnamed brightly colored paper with the most striking graphics in Bangkok. I couldn't read a word of the Thai glyphs, but I bought a copy every time I spotted the paper. A helpful Thai flight attendant tried to translate the name for me on the flight home. "It's a paper about magic," she said.
Exactly.
My family and our Palo Alto, Calif., friends Cathy and Ed Sterbenc with their boys Jack and Michael spent the week after Easter last month on the Yucatan peninsula, trotting up and down the Mayan ruins in temperatures that constituted a heat wave even in Mexico. Any time I saw a paper, I bought it. My kids have seen me do this since they were toddler, but it amused Ed no end. ?You know, the news hasn?t changed,? he?d say as I bought my fourth or fifth paper of the day.
Predictably, I fell hard for one of the newspapers, and even developed a serious case of like for its rival.
"La i" is the odd and inexplicable name of my new favorite newspaper. Its motto, ?Noticias para mi,? news for me, only confuses thing since i doesn?t mean I in Spanish. The square tabloid is published by Grupo Informative del Sureste out of Merida, Yucatan with editions in the state of Quintana Roo.
La i is what would be known in Mexico City as a "red" paper for the quantity of blood spilling from its images. Most of the content chronicles the three Cs of classic red papers: Car crashes, crime and corpses. La i adds a fourth C, clutter. Like many Yucatan dailies it features several pages daily of "shame of the city" photos, showing exposed wires hanging from street lights or debris uncollected on sidewalks.
But La i differs in important ways from papers such as the weekly Alarma! or the Mexico City afternoon dailies filled with gruesome crime and accident photos. Those traditional reds leaven the gore with sober headlines that express a well-feigned horror at these tragedies.
La i -- and its even more down-market rival, De Peso, which declares its concerns right on the flag: "Police, Spectacles, Sports" -- take open delight in their reporting of tragedies. The headline on a car crash is likely to read something like, "It's not MY fault!" (when drivers blamed each other for the accident) or "Watch where you're going, Miguelito!" (when a certain Miguel G?mez Pinz?n, caused a five-car collision by running a red light in VW bug). "You should give up your (driving) license!" one De Peso headline advised a story subject.
The traditional reds like to portray a Mexico going to hell in a handbasket. These Yucatan tabs seem to reflect the informal national slogan, "De Mexico no hay otro." There's no place like Mexico.
But as entertaining as I found this wisenheimer approach to news, it was the design of La i that won me over. Of course, that's because it is pretty much a direct rip-off of another of my newspaper crushes: the Guatemala daily Nuestro Diario.
Like that extraordinarily successful paper, featured in the December 2004 issue of E&P, the pages of La i bring to life the ideas of the U.S. newspaper industry-funded Readership Institute.
Every single image is full-color. Dozens of faces of ordinary readers stare from the pages. La i, like Nuestro Diario, keeps advertising out of the first several pages, on the theory that readers -- not advertisers -- deserve the prime positions in a paper. There are three, four, five, even more ways to enter a story, and a photo caption will add new information, never repeat something from the main story.
Stories from other Mexican states or foreign nations are invariably accompanied by a small map and data box labeled "Where it happened." So a story about flooding in Romania includes a small map, the name of the capital, and the sizes of the nation's population and land.
All but the smallest headlines include one word highlighted in a contrasting color and wider font that neatly functions as a label. So a headline about violence next door in Guatemala reads, "Two youths strangled by GANGS in Guatemala."
And like Guatemala?s Nuestro Diario, the fluff content is carefully calibrated not to turn off women readers. One day La i featured a double-truck poster of a pretty young woman, but in the main photo and all the accompanying smaller images she was completely clothed, not even posing in a swim suit.
By contrast, De Peso one day featured on its front page a photo of Poppy Montgomery, the blonde bombshell star of television series "Contigo Siempre," wearing nothing but two scallop shells strategically placed on her breasts.
De Peso goes for two pesos, or a little less than 20 cents, while La i sells for three.
Someone reading nothing but La i and De Peso could be forgiven for not knowing that the campaign for one of the most critical elections in Mexican history is in full swing. But then, the Yucatan peninsula offers serious papers, several of them almost as well-designed and conceived as La i.
Among the best is a tab called "La Verdad," The Truth. Selling for five pesos, or about 50 cents, the paper had consistently excellent political reporting, some aggressive local investigative work, and an eye for the big picture. It reported on the fight to keep public access to beaches, where increasing numbers of resorts are use varying degrees of intimidation to keep a kind of tourist apartheid.
La Verdad's problem is that it has a beautiful front page, and dull inside pages. Inside section fronts identified with black-and-white versions of USA Today, which these days look tired even in the snappy color of The Nation's Newspaper.
Periodico Quequi, another obscurely named tab, does serious with more of a design flare. The most expensive on the peninsula at seven peso, Quequi mixes concise political coverage with community-oriented ?good news? stories around themes such as ?April, the Month of the Child.? The tabloid features zoned sections, and has the peninsula?s the most extensive classified section, printed on yellow paper. I didn?t see that section distributed separately, but that would seem a natural.
Milenio, the serious national tabloid, publishes a Yucatan edition, under the name Milenio Novedades.
After La i, the best selling paper appeared to be Por Esto!, a bulky tabloid with a cover price of 6 pesos, twice that of La i. Por Esto!?s motto of ?Dignity, Identity and Sovereignty? was seriously undercut nearly every day with grotesque front-page photos of accident or crime victims. When a bus crash that killed 67 people made national news April 17, Por Esto! the next day ran front-page photos of several unclothed female corpses.
That paper I didn?t fall in love with.
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