Ssprueth Magers Gallery at Basel Art, 15-19 June

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The latest kid on the block to offer information on events in Switzerland is Marcus Berry, who formerly worked for WRG radio in Geneva before it became public radio station WRS, and for Swisster, which closed in December 2010. Berry’s new web site is called Inanyevent and proposes events listings country-wide, funded by advertising.

Berry’s venture joins a mushrooming collection of events listings on English-language sites.

The two most complete were both started nearly five years ago and have grown steadily: the events pages on GenevaLunch and on the AngloInfo site, both of which list regional events for the Lake Geneva area plus Swiss-wide major events of interest to the international population.

Several other sites (see list below), notably Know it All Passports and Leman Events offer a personal selection of what’s on. WRS radio offers a weekly selection and the many business clubs list their own and sometimes other groups’ events.

Relocation agencies and women’s clubs in most cities keep their own events lists and city guides: the quality varies considerably.

Web sites list events as a community service or for commercial reasons because they are “sticky”, with readers returning to a site where they know they can count on finding out what’s on. Returning visitors should hold appeal for advertisers, web business wisdom argues.

Here’s a selection of where to go to find out what’s on, in English, in the Lake Geneva region, but also in the rest of Switzerland. It iincludes only sites that are frequently updated and have a reliable track record, since several sites have started to list events then stopped or they list them erratically.

GenevaLunch volunteer has posted more than 2,500 events!

But first a well-earned word of praise for Laila Rodriguez, who has diligently volunteered for the past three-plus years to put together the GenevaLunch events lists.

Listing what’s on and finding the right balance between an incomplete list or an unwieldy one with some events of very limited appeal is far from an automatic or quick job, as many sites have learned to their dismay.

It takes time and good knowledge of the area covered to filter and get a good mix. Laila finds time every week for this behind-the-scenes unpaid labour of love, providing the international community with a valuable community service.

Next time you check out our events page think of Laila and smile, please, because she’s posted some 2,500 events for you!

Where to find out what’s on, Swiss and Lake Geneva region sites

Official tourism: Most Swiss cities list their own city events in English, useful for an overview (note: GenevaLunch events includes our selections from these) and Geneva-Annecy-Mont Blanc tourism offers events in English from over the border. Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Basel, Zurich official pages. One of the best tourism/city guides/what’s on sources of information is the newly re-launched MySwitzerland web site.

Lake Geneva region + main Swiss events, a community service, GenevaLunch events page

Geneva region, business directory + commercial (advertising) featured events, Angloinfo

Personal weekly selection of events in the Lake Geneva region, Know it all Passport

Personal selection plus their own commercial events, Leman Events

Social media: Glocals.com offers a selection of local events posted by its readers, as does the English Forum, and both are Swiss-wide, but Glocals tends to be more active in the Lake Geneva region. The English Forum and its new “local” news site are both run from Sweden and Germany, which limits its value to input from forum members who are in Switzerland.

Mainly for tourists, commercial lists: What’s on When from Frommers

L’Hebdo has just published a story about the demise of Lausanne-based Swisster, which closed its doors in December 2010. GenevaLunch and other English language sites are mentioned as one of the likely causes. It’s true that there is probably some splintering of traffic due to the number of sites around, but these mostly serve different purposes and meet different needs. This is why GenevaLunch has always supported groups like glocals.com, Englishforum.ch, worldradio.ch, angloinfo.ch, lemanevents.ch, and more, believing that as a news provider, we are complementary and here to help the international community thrive.

Our traffic more than doubled in 2009 and again in 2010, and we’re well on the road to doing the same this year. We’ve done this on a tiny budget, with nothing like the backing of a large company like Edipresse. This is not meant as a criticism of Swisster, whose staff were good and the team made an effort. I believe, as editor of GenevaLunch, that there is a real need for online news in English that is tailored to a local/regional population, and that the key to success is getting the mix right.

As for the business model, we don’t have a magic wand, nor does anyone else in the media business right now, but we think it’s time to look further than the classic income source provided by advertising and find new and creative solutions that are the right size for each media.

Here’s my response to the Hebdo story:

Cannabis captured by police in Lausanne

This is a cannabis day, news-wise, but the best is the ducks and worms story making the media rounds.

To start:

• First, in Switzerland, we have the endless media fascination with Bernard Rappaz, whose main claim to fame is that he sold marijuana, became an unofficial spokesperson for making it legal, and he’s spent years fighting authorities over it. He’s been on a hunger strike since August, but the latest word is that he’ll stop if they reduce his current sentence.
• And then there’s the man in Lausanne who grew 330 marijuana plants near the police station, and was found out (plants were destroyed).
• In nearby France a man named Michel Rouyer wasfined for giving his ducks cannabis to get rid of their worms. It’s a great silly story, so has been picked up by media around the world, but the best version remains the original, in French, published by Sudouest.

The real winner for cannabis stories today is Ganja.com, or maybe Google Translator or Babble, for the truly weird version they’ve published in English of Rouyer’s little run-in with the French police. Guys, were you maybe smoking something? Here’s a little teaser: “A police spokesman said the case of marijuana for this is the first duck ever dealt with local police.”

An earlier accident, with truck overturned on the A1, necessitating a large emergency crew and the autoroute partially closed

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - GenevaLunch, like a lot of other businesses in the area, was caught by the massive traffic jam in both directions, between Geneva and Lausanne Wednesday late afternoon. It lasted more than four hours, had traffic moving at a crawl on the autoroute, and side roads anywhere near the highway were also packed with cars and very slow traffic. The cause was an accident at 14:45 near the Coppet exit, caused by an accident: the driver of a car lost control as she passed a semi-trailer truck, heading towards Geneva. She veered to the left, then to the right and the truck driver, trying to avoid her, ended up overturning his vehicle.

The driver of the car was taken to the university hospitals (HUG) in Lausanne with injuries that are not serious, and the other driver was not injured.

It took more than half a dozen fire trucks well over three hours to remove the truck. During that time part of the autoroute was closed.

The problem with getting older is that you remember the “good old days” that might not have been great, but that were better. Ten years ago I commuted daily between Saint Prex, in Vaud, and my office in Geneva. I could count on traffic being bad between 07:30 and 09:00, and 17:00 and 18:45. There were occasional accidents, but an accident that could block all traffic in the area for four hours was truly exceptional.

I’ve watched the impact of growing traffic density, and I think we have now reached the point where the failure to create six lanes where needed, or to provide workable public transport for people who live in the region’s small towns, is costing the Lake Geneva region a fortune. To do a rough calculation, if only one-third of drivers stuck in that 20 km stretch, going both directions, earn an average of CHF80 an hour and there are 165 cars per kilometre (they were bumper to bumper, so I’m allowing a bit more than a metre between them), and they each spent an extra hour on the road, the wasted work time alone costs about CHF176,000. Judging by the number of SUVs and other expensive vehicles the average wage is higher than CHF80. And maybe some of them didn’t lose an hour.

Add in the additional cost of running the cars, lost productivity rather than just wages, not to mention the cost to the environment. Vaud and Geneva need to redo their sums, look at the number of hours lost in traffic jams, which are larger and far more frequent than in the past. They now must convince the powers that be in Bern to add a third rail line and/or follow up the improvement around Morges with a similar system to widen the autoroute where it is most needed, Nyon or Coppet to Versoix, for example.

Usain Bolt at IMD business school in Lausanne; agent Norman Peart on the right

One of the things that I like best about being a journalist is going to meetings with people in the news and hearing what they really said, rather than what other journalists write up afterwards about what they said. It’s not that we journalists get it wrong (well, sometimes we do) , so much as that we pluck out one thread from several and turn that into a story. Sometimes the thread is pretty thin.

A good example came Tuesday evening, when Usain Bolt spoke to a couple hundred people at IMD business school in Lausanne about the principles of sustaining success. He was asked by a member of the audience about his plans, how long he plans to run. This came shortly after he and his agent, who was also part of the programme, had laughed about how often journalists get it wrong, and how Bolt was widely quoted at one point about his expectations for a particular race—words he never said, they both assured us.

So Bolt’s relexed answer, legs and orange-clad feet stretched out in front of him, was that he would like to do the next two Olympics, 2012 and 2016, and then see. He might decide to do something else after that, but it depends on how things go.

This was the closest thing to news in an evening of otherwise interesting but not hot news remarks about how he prepares for races and what it’s like in the room with all the other runners just before a race. Reuters was there, and as a news agency they have to come up with a news story, of course, so not surprisingly, it was Bolt’s casual remarks about the Olympics that the reporter used as a news peg.

Here’s the story which, by the way, is perfectly accurate, I think: “Bolt says 2016 Olympics may be his last”.

But here are some of the other bits of information that have come out of that meeting, most of them close to what he said, but not accurate according to my memory and that of the journalist who was with me: he’ll be switching to the long jump (this, from Track & Field is more accurate), he’ll be switching to other events after 2012, he says people are already saying he’s a legend (the quote I wrote down is that he’d like to be a legend).

We’ve added a rich list of events and other information for the holidays to our events page. Be sure to check there to find out about late shopping hours in Geneva, Nyon and Lausanne, how to find the Christmas concert that suits your tastes, and more!

Helena Bachmann, who lives in the Lake Geneva region, has written a good overview for Time magazine on assisted suicide and Switzerland’s efforts to rein in death tourism. She reminds us that the current law dates back to 1942 and brings us up to 2009, with the Swiss government saying the law is now too lax and must be rewritten. Bachmann includes an interesting interview with maxillofacial surgeon Jerome Sobel in Lausanne, who is the president of French-speaking Switzerland’s Exit office (Dignitas is the other main organization that offers suicide assistance). As with so many issues, this one is not as black and white as we might like it to be and her article explores some of the gray areas. Recommended reading.

Stories not making front page headlines but that are worth a moment’s reflection:

The US Justice Department says crimes by girls have been rising and by 2004 girls’ crimes were 30 percent of the total by juvenile delinquents. Little research has been done in this area, so no one seems to know why crimes by girls are increasing, although one part of the answer could be changes to the justice system in the US.

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen where the IOC (International Olympic Committee) just awarded the 2016 Games to Rio de Janeiro, the sports group also adopted a number of recommendations. One of these is the challenging Recommendation 66: “The Olympic Movement should strengthen its partnership with the computer game industry in order to explore opportunities to encourage physical activity, and the practice and understanding of sport among the diverse population of computer game users.” (good luck!) Olympic Congress Recommendations in full

And, in a peculiarly American news approach, both Bloomberg and Associated Press have now managed to put Roman Polanski (sex crime escapee) and tax cheats (IRS tax dodgers) into bed together with a lovely duvet-style Swiss feather cover over them (read that: Switzerland and Swiss neutrality = haven for all crimes committed by right-thinking Americans, which indicates editorial confusion).

After this dubious snuggle-down, what comes out is that a) Switzerland is “no longer” a haven, which implies that it has been, for all crimes, while forgetting completely about accurate reporting and b) that Switzerland, tut-tut, will have to live like the rest of the world, which is a sign that the writers, or more probably their editors, haven’t budged since 1980. Switzerland may not be a member of the European Union, but it has adopted much of the legislation, for a start and, frankly, the days when Switzerland was an island of oddity are over. Now Switzerland is as odd as any other country around. Back in 1980 all Swiss stories published in the US had to include gold under the streets of Zurich, cheese with holes, chocolate and cuckoo clocks, even though the Swiss have tried for years to point out that cuckoo clocks are Austrian, not Swiss. As for the other three, my editors at three major US news publications all told me this, at one point or another during the early 1980s. It made for some slightly skewered reporting at the time.

Looks like some things never change, but I’m not talking about the Swiss, who have.

Last night I attended a talk in Lausanne on climate change and sustainability given by Lynette Thorstensen to Executives International at the Palace Hotel. Anyone who has ever gone to the hotel from the train station knows you either hike three blocks or so steeply uphill (and do NOT wear heels, sheer hell on uphill cobblestones) or you take the wimpy option and pay for a taxi. That’s all in the past, I discovered last night. A train ticket includes a Mobilis ticket for an hour, which covers public transport. And that includes the marvel of Lausanne, the newish M2 Metro. Two minutes, no sweat, no extra money and I was at the Palace.

More on the the presentation tomorrow. Meanwhile, check out the GenevaLunch Travel Guide details for Lausanne, especially if you haven’t visited the city for a few months.

We have just added information to the Cheerful traveler guides, on traveling to and around in Basel, Bern and Zurich. They’re designed for people who live in the Lake Geneva region and travel to other Swiss cities for business or pleasure, but visitors to Switzerland will also find them helpful.

We’re in the process of updating two of our other guides, so be sure to revisit these pages in the next few days.