FranceAntilles Goes Online

Our local paper, FranceAntilles, is available online starting today: FranceAntilles.fr.

FranceAntilles is Guadeloupe's primary newspaper, and comes out 6 days a week. A standard paper costs 0.80, more when there are supplements. We don't manage to buy all 6, but I would say at least 3 each week.

To be honest, its not a great paper. Its not so much journalism than reporting. The stories are not always very interesting (though, I may be biased there...there are just lots of local stuff that doesn't interest me because I'm not local...at least not yet). Too much space is given to 'news in brief' sorts of items, where boyfriends beat their pregnant girlfriends, or where people are given tickets for speeding, or where girlfriend-beating boyfriends speed and get a ticket. An average of three pages are dedicated to the horse races. National and International News gets squished into one page.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thinks the paper could use some improvement. When I searched France Antilles on Wikipedia, a short stub came up. It was not so much an encyclopedic entry as a scathing criticism (1). The writer was much harsher than I am, pointing out that there are grammar problems, spelling mistakes, and questioned the credentials of the journalists themselves. The issue about boring stories came up, too.

Still, its my local paper now. I read it so I know about whats going on in Guadeloupe. I don't want to miss the banana festivals and such. Its also the best way to understand the people themselves: what concerns them, what moves them, what interests them.

Even if I still read the New York Times faithfully online everyday.

(1) Ce journal fait lieu à plusieurs débats et est au centre de nombreuses critiques négatives à son sujet. Effectivement, plusieurs personnes se plaignent du journal quant à la qualité de l'expression écrite, de l'orthographe et doutent fortement des qualifications des journalistes. Aussi les sujets traités sont dites très souvent "inintéressants", avec en grande majorité des faits divers, comme de simples accidents mineurs, des constats, des altercations entre personnes dans la rue. On aurait pour ainsi dire pu croire que les articles sont le résumé d'histoires futiles transmis par quelques voisins au regard déplacé. Il est aussi profondément ancré dans le pays Martinique et sait retranscrire les émotions de la population de ce département d'Outre-Mer. (Source: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Antilles)