This one is for the news junkies

One of the things about living in or near a smaller city is that you don’t have too many options when it comes to local news.  In Windsor, for example, there’s only one daily newspaper, the Windsor Star.  That is the only game in town.  It’s not the only current events source though, there’s Windsorite, CTV News, CBC News, BlackburnNews. and then the local radio stations like CKLW.  There are also community located sources/blogs.  The content that’s provided is mainly local with the news sources picking up major news stories from their sister publications.  The value of a newspaper is that it will always contain many more stories and much more information than other news sources.

There’s really only one editorial voice and you have to rely on comments on the community for others.  You know how that can be!

So, people like me who thrive on reading will turn to the big three Toronto newspapers as other sources.

For the most part, that satisfies but there are times when you want more.  In that case, I have my favourites to check out – I’m a big Formula 1 fan and nobody covers it like the big British web sources.  Of course, you have to wade your way through the soccer stories to get there!

I’ve mentioned before that I’ll use Google Maps to get a look at the racetracks.  That’s neat.  I’ll also do an internet search for local-to-the-race newspapers.  It can be time consuming but it kills a bit of time while waiting for the race to start.  I find it fascinating to see how the event is perceived by their local news.

With PressReader, the process got a little easier.  It’s a service with a free and a commercial side to it that rivals the Newseum.  

So, yesterday was the Russian Grand Prix.  I hopped over to the Newseum and they didn’t have any Russian newspapers but the PressReader certainly did.  In fact, there’s a great collection from around the world.

Down I scroll to Russia and there were 169 results.

Scrolling across showed lots of front pages with most of them written in Russian.  I’d have to brush up on my language.  Fortunately for me, there were a couple of English language papers.  With 169 choices, it would be nice to filter further and, in fact I could, by type.

The three sports services would be great if you’re a soccer fan and spoke Russian!  So, it was back to my traditional sources to get the thoughts post race.

I know that, for some, Formula 1 racing is a niche sport so I wasn’t terribly surprised.

However, I could see many uses for this resource in the class from reading the front pages of foreign newspaper to reinforce the importance of a second language to seeing how various sources select and put content on their front page.

Give it a click and start exploring.