European sites that tell me what's happening?

May 8, 2007 10:32 AM

News, culture, technology, best-of-the-web sites with a european scope & focus?

I realized that all the sites that I frequent to find out what's happening are American or British. There's nothing wrong with that per se but since I'm on the European continent I'd really like to expand that with some sites that focus more on Europe.

Sites that I frequent now are guardian.co.uk, slate.com, timesonline.co.uk, nytimes.com, metafilter obviously, mefi equivalents, news.bbc.co.uk, etc.

Obviously i can start to read spiegel.de, lemonde.fr, [...] but with 27 member states that will not scale, let alone that I don't speak most languages.
But sites that are based in one nation but are in english and are not exclusively internally oriented can be interesting too.

Obviously there is the issue with the languages. To me english is the most practical lingua franca for north-west europe but for really interesting sites I'd be able to resuscitate my command of German and French.

I'm not very much into weblogs. But maybe I'll find out here that I'm wrong in that respect.
For the rest I don't want to mention to much constraints; I'm open to all kinds of "what's up" sites.
just to be clear; this is not meant as a form of criticism on mefi

posted by jouke to media & arts (11 comments total)

What about the French or English version of Le Monde Diplomatique?
posted by rom1 at 11:15 AM on May 8, 2007

Expatica provides news in English for various European countries.
posted by stungeye at 11:16 AM on May 8, 2007

Le Monde Diplomatique with its foreign affairs analysis looks interesting. Tx rom1

Expatica seems to be more oriented towards the internal news of the countries. Tx though stungeye
posted by jouke at 11:55 AM on May 8, 2007

Euro-wide:

International Herald Tribune, slightly stuffy.

EUObserver, ditto.

Tech news: Heise has an English version. The comments (only in German, obviously) are on a modded-down-Digg level though.

Der Spiegel also has an English version.

From my corner of the world:

Neue Zürcher Zeitung English edition - good international coverage.

Swissinfo is pretty good and it's available in 9 languages, including English. Swiss-focused but also some international coverage.

Actually I think more and more national news services and outlets have English versions - just look around, to see how each nation thinks about stuff.
posted by derMax at 11:56 AM on May 8, 2007

For Eurocentric cultural happenings, I tend to check out Sign & Sight
posted by Chrischris at 11:59 AM on May 8, 2007

Hey that's großartig, derMax. Apart from Der Spiegel I'd never heard of these.
Do you know any mefi-ähnliche german language online communities?
posted by jouke at 12:05 PM on May 8, 2007

France 24 has an English language version of both its website and 24 hour news channel (streamed for free as well, albeit in WMV format).
posted by lodev at 12:11 PM on May 8, 2007

By googling linkto: www.signandsight.com I found A fistful of Euros which has a side bar chockful with europe oriented sites in the categories news, culture, media, humorous, linkers of wonderful things, etc.
Good one chrischris.

Looks like France 24 is similar to news.bbc.co.uk. Tx lodev
posted by jouke at 12:24 PM on May 8, 2007

The Irish Times, Pravda, Euronews?
posted by ReiToei at 3:35 PM on May 8, 2007

For tech coverage, I rate the Register, even though it is British based. They seem to cover EU stuff pretty well. Better, that is, than a lot of other UK tech media and infinitely better than US sources.
posted by bystander at 8:54 PM on May 8, 2007

Apparently news sites are better known than communities etc. Which is understandable on a US forum.
For future reference; a list of all Digg-like communities.
There's a list of non-english ones; ekudos is dutch, webnews is german....
posted by jouke at 3:31 AM on May 13, 2007