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

Zurich is a financial capital, but definitely not the seat of government for Switzerland!

At long last, someone put together a picture for us of the Qaddafi family, all of whom are on lists for frozen assets in Switzerland: thanks go to Ria Novosti, Russian news agency. Aunts, uncles and the rest of the clan are not here, but the children are all here, with photos and their birthdates.

Bern, centrally located and on the language divide, is the capital of Switzerland

A news story mistake became the story this week, giving us a reminder of why local news providers (that’s us!) are often more credible. Associated Press in the US ran a story about Google Street View and mentioned Zurich, with the editors at a safe distance, in New York. The story noted that Zurich is the capital of Switzerland. Oops. A correction was sent out, and since the first story was picked up by several US media, word for word, a lot of corrections then appeared. Google News for Zurich suddenly had a stream of stories that started with the intriguing one-liner “Zurich is not the capital of Switzerland.”

The problem wasn’t the reporter, I hasten to add: Frank Jordans, who reported the story, has been in Geneva for several years and he’s covered enough political stories from Bern to know it’s the capital. I can only assume an inexperienced sub-editor in the US thought the world might not know the capital of Switzerland, so thought to add it.

Years from now, though, I’m willing to bet a lot of people will still be insisting that Zurich is indeed the capital of that little Alpine nation because after all, they once saw it on the news.

The mistake also underscores the growing problem of aggregated and massaged (rewritten) news stories from sites that do not themselves produce news or have journalists behind them: the story in its original form is still out there, no corrections made.

Pssst: Bern is the capital.

The BBC gives us a fun little travel story

Ice roads: here’s one of those great little feature articles we used to see regularly in mainstream media, but since editors can’t afford to pay for them anymore, they’ve become the domain of bloggers and travel groups, which is too bad. This is one of the BBC’s “from our own correspondent” series, and I fear that with BBC cutbacks in several countries we might see fewer of these, too.

Reuters carries a story about a relatively new service in Zurich, started by a pastor, to provide shelter to men in the days following a marital breakup. It’s a thoughtful feature article, the kind media used to be able to do more often, about a thoughtful service, worth the read. It’s not a huge project, with only three men at a time staying at the house, but I like this: “He said the problem pervades all sections of society and that he sees men from all walks of life hit by the problem. ‘In such a reality people are suffering,’ he said.”

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.

Patrick Liotard Vogt is moving from Zurich to New York. He went to school at rich kids’ school Le Rosey in Rolle, so we can probably safely assume that he spends time on roads between Zurich and Geneva. The very-rich jet-setting 25-year-old who says he is involved with some 40 companies (he’s chairman of Poken, a startup I know and like, founded by IMD graduate Stéphane Doutriaux). The Huffington Post carries a lengthy interview with him. The last line caught my eye: he likes to drive too fast. So that’s who is in one of those cars zooming past on the autoroute.

And another line: “I come from a family that is more about being successful than being rich. We always learned that if you give something you have to get something. My great grandfather was the CEO and Chairman of Nestle. He started at the bottom and worked his way up. That’s very motivating.”

I had to read that quote a couple times to make sure I had it the right way around: it’s not about philanthropy.

Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Lonely Planet travel guides have included Zurich in their latest pick of 10 favourite cities around the world. The guides call Zurich the “most outrageous” of Switzerland’s cities (Geneva is the most “cosmopolitan”). Down with the stuffy old too-clean banking centre image, up with the “proudly party heavy by night” face to the city.

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.