My 'Cronica' Crush

By: Mark Fitzgerald These days, sad to say, I rarely come back from a trip out of town really jazzed about some local newspaper I encountered. More often, they inspire a certain depression, like visiting a distant relative remembered as vigorous and lively who is now a shadow of himself.

But traveling out of the country -- that, inevitably, is another story. Inevitably, I fall deeply in love with some foreign newspaper.

Almost as inevitably, the object of my crush is not the national newspaper or the revered big-city metro, as good as they may be. Instead, it's the popular rag that people on the street actually seem to be reading. It's the paper that won't tell you much about who's in and who's out in the national government -- but makes an account of a car accident somehow compelling even to a gringo visitor.

My most recent crush is Cronica. It's a loud, raucous and thoroughly enjoyable paper I made the acquaintance of on a recent visit to Asuncion, Paraguay, for the Inter American Press Association Midyear Meeting. Paraguay has two quite good national newspapers, ABC Color and La Nacion, and it was a proud day indeed when I appeared in both on the same day. I bought five copies for my Momma.

Even by the standards of Latin American popular tabs -- notorious for their generous dollops of cheesecake, gossip, sports and, especially, bloody encounters ranging from crashes to bar fights that are as often written to provoke laughter as tears -- Cronica is unique.

As unique and strange as Paraguay itself strikes a visitor.

Like any popular press, it features plenty of barely clad beauties. But consider how Cronica reported on the contest of "Miss Summer." Running as a double truck -- and every day I was there, the double truck was reserved for similar cheesecake -- the package of text and photos reported that the contest had been an upset. The "favorite" had come in third! (Do they have a betting line on beauty queens in Paraguay?) Not only that, the paper suggested in one caption that the favorite was so mad she attempted to wrest the banner from the winner. Did the photo show anything like that? Well, I guess you had to be there.

But if the laddies who are the target for this sort of thing come for the pictures, they undoubtedly stay for the writing -- a swingy, slangy street vendor stew of Spanish and the indigenous Guarani.

Consider this account of a knife fight by a jealous boyfriend who didn't like the way a guy was making "little eyes" at his girl -- and refused to "wear the 'virtual' horns." He sliced up the interloper "in full," the paper wrote, using that English phrase, which I'm guessing is a local culinary term.

Other phrases were more mystifying. Because sprinkled through the account -- indeed, everywhere in the paper -- were sudden phrases and even full sentences in the indigenous language Guarani, which is understood, so I understand, by the great majority of Paraguayans. The tone was jocular, but also sort of street judgmental. At one point the unbylined writer comments to the knife-wielder, "Chongo!" The word can mean different specific things in different countries, so I'm told, but "lowlife" seems like a good generalization.

I can't imagine an English equivalent in even the earthiest tabloid: "Authorities say Smith turned as if to leave, then lunged at Jones with the knife, slicing his thigh in full. Duuuude!"

Cronica headlines rarely say So-and-So "says" something, when they can use the Guarani "he'i." One memorable hed concerned the Austrian monster Josef Fritzl pleading guilty to incest and murder in the imprisonment of his daughter: "Soy culpable, he'i Fritzl."

The overall effect is of a high-speed, knowing narrative. I couldn't understand it completely, or even mostly, but then I'm not the audience.

Cronica, though, could be taking its daily directions from the Readership Institute back here in Evanston, Ill. It has the quick articles, the many entry points, the "people like me" staring from the pages.

I flipped through the mainstream daily ABC Color, stopping whenever an article or image interested. I practically studied Cronica, arrested repeatedly by prose or photo.

Cronica even aspires to the Readership Institute's job-to-do -- not just the "something to talk about" goal but also "it makes me smarter."

Cronica's motto? "All you need to know."

Word, Chongo!