Shoptalk: It's All Greek To Me

By: Mark Fitzgerald Take your growing sons to Istanbul and Athens, as my wife Lyn and I did this summer, and you will surely excite their intellectual curiosity as they wander through cities mixing the glories of ruined empires with the sophistication of modern Europe. Kieran, my 15-year-old, concluded that the washroom hand- dryers in Istanbul blew stronger than the ones in Athens. His 12-year-old brother Des announced that fried calamari is better in Greece than in Turkey, but neither prepares it quite as well as Pasta D'Arte, the Italian joint around the corner from us in Chicago.

I wish I were an exception to this Innocents Abroad crassness. I did not prepare as Lyn did for each new sight by reading its history. In truth, I was most fascinated not by a domed mosque or Doric column, but by the kiosks spilling over with newspapers in languages I couldn't read. As I flipped through the pages, my head filled with questions about the papers back in the States:

How come newspapers in Istanbul and Athens can fill every page with color, and we can't? For that matter, how come papers in Guatemala City and Bangkok and Berlin can do it, and American newspapers can't? The rest of the world has discovered it lives in color. For all our pretty front pages and suitable-for-framing section fronts, U.S. papers all too quickly dump readers into gray and dismal inside pages.

How is it that Greece and Turkey can sustain not just one national sports daily each, but more than half a dozen? Meanwhile, the only place you can get a copy of The National, the last serious U.S. attempt at a sports daily, is on eBay. It simply makes no sense that a sports daily cannot make it in a nation with an apparently insatiable appetite for sports, and with enough different sports to entertain us year-round.

The Turkish and Greek sports dailies are some of the most handsome papers on the stands, with beautiful graphics that had even me thinking that, hey, maybe soccer really is the "Beautiful Game." On the island of Rhodes, I spotted the best of the sports dailies, a tabloid whose name Greek acquaintances variously translated as "We're Victorious" or "Champions." Here's the kicker: It's published by a professional soccer team. Just imagine if George Steinbrenner published a sports daily. Or Ozzie Guillen in Chicago. That would be a newspaper war worth watching.

Is it possible there's hope for the broadsheet yet? I'll admit it, I'm firmly in the "The Future Belongs To Tabs" camp. And there was plenty of evidence to sustain that bias in Europe. Just compare the fusty Die Welt broadsheet with its jazzy Die Welt Kompact edition. But Istanbul's dazzling dailies are virtually all broadsheets, the old-fashioned kind, wide as the present-day Wall Street Journal before it gets its haircut. They succeed because of imaginative and bold graphics, a willingness to break design rules with a chaos of elements worthy of the nation that gave us the whirling dervish ? plus, let me say it again, color on every page and image. There was one widely advertised broadsheet, Zaman, that was handsome, but played by U.S. design rules. It's the paper of the Islamist fundamentalists, a guide told me.

Could American papers revive their flagging Sunday circulations the way a number of Athens papers do ? by packaging them with pornographic DVDs and magazines? Um, probably not.

To a Midwest family making our way to Sunday Mass in Athens, it was remarkable to see just what graphic wares newspapers like Espresso and others were offering underneath the shrink wrap. When I wrote a story for the March issue of E&P contrasting the reluctance of U.S. publishers to offer big-value premiums with European papers' liberal use of them, I didn't know the half of it.

Do the Greeks say to each other, "I don't know, it's all English to me?" Not sure, but Metro, the ubiquitous global publisher of free commuter dailies, puts out an edition in Athens. And just as predictably, Metro has attracted competition, including one that calls itself, using the English word and alphabet, Metropolis. A third free tab has also taken an English name, City Press.

Why does the International Herald Tribune ? oh, how shall I say this ? stink? In newspaper kiosks bright as flower shops with the vivid local dailies, this gray wallflower is my nation's newspaper ambassador abroad, literally an ugly American. You forget just how bad the paper is until you're forced to live with it. When I was in Istanbul, I could read the surprisingly lively Turkish Daily News, but in Greece I was stuck with the IHT or the inevitably two-day-old USA Today. The IHT shows that sometimes keeping items short ? everybody's prescription for newspapers these days ? just means being skimpy on the news. The paper's only bright spot is a column written by Roger Cohen, who surely deserves a better showcase than a dull paper that has remained utterly unchanged since the Cold War.