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A debate takes place Wednesday that could affect the price of your local newspaper, which, in case you are not aware, includes those fat papers filled with ads from Coop and the TCS auto club. The upper house of the Swiss parliament is considering changes to temporary subsidies given to low circulation (under 40,000) newspapers, reports Le Temps. The idea behind the federal aid is that a well-informed public needs to be offered a variety of sources of information.

The theory is sound, but the practice is one of those bits of comfortable nonsense for which Switzerland has too long had a reputation. Switzerland has many strong points, one of which is not its media. Ask any English-speaker who comes from a country with strong competition in the media industry what they think of Swiss newspapers and the answer is likely to be “I don’t bother reading them.” The language gap is not the issue: it is the overall weak reporting and, with few exceptions, the parochial tone, not to be confused with local coverage. Le Temps is a notable exception and in an editorial at the end of the article Jean Jacques Roth makes the point that it costs more money to write in depth about the Swiss health care system than it does to cover (journalistically speaking) Britney Spear’s bum.

The money under discussion helps reduce newspaper postage rates. Small newspapers have indeed been struggling, but few of them have made the leap to the Internet, an obvious solution in a country where a high percentage of homes have good Internet access. Granted, online and in newsprint are not the same – this editor is the first to say there is nothing like a great cup of coffee in a nice cafe while you roam through a newspaper.

Small newspapers face the same dilemma GenevaLunch has faced: how do you provide quality news coverage to a small segment of the larger community? Online, with far lower costs. The options to provide a printed version exist if you look for them. But subsidies have made it possible for the smaller newspapers to survive, just, without a fight, and for the larger ones which are owned by only two major and one minor player, to operate without worrying about real competition. Ironically, that has not made them better.

Do I want to spend my tax dollars trying to ensure that a couple small newspapers can fight the far deeper pocketbook of Edipresse? No. Far better, if they insist on continuing in print, to find owners for them like Edipresse, who are willing to keep their loss-making newspapers going for the sake of prestige, as Tibère Adler explained to the American International Club during a recent luncheon presentation on his company.

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