Over at Teekay’s

Courtesy of East Ethnia, here’s a hilarious book review by Matt Taibbi from my favorite New York freebie paper, the Press, of Thomas L. Friedman’s latest bestselling explain-it-all. I enjoy Friedman’s columns in the Times but find them exasperating at the same time, though he sure does a good job at driving his points home.

His latest opus is somehow about globalization and the flattening of the world and how everything is interconnected and all that — and it seems to be one of those books you can safely ignore if you’ve read just one review, provided it’s this one.

Update, 4/24: of course, I should also point out that many of the same complaints as in Taibbi’s reviews were already made in a piece published in the Economist (cover date 4/2), which was almost as sharp as the book seems to deserve.

Yesterday’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung ran an interesting article about the latest product from Swiss publisher Ringier, a company that virtually invented the tabloid in Switzerland with Blick many years ago and is now emulating its success (which has grown a bit stale in Switzerland itself) in places farther east. It’s called Blic Evropa and aims at, you guessed it, the Serbian — and Serb — diaspora in Europe, whose number the publisher puts at roughly one million. Blic has eight pages every day that specifically provide information on Germany, Switzerland, and Austria — host to (I believe) the largest Serb diaspora communities in Europe — and things like visa, cheap flights to Serbia, and so forth.

There is, of course, already a similar title at many newsstands in these countries: Vesti is made specifically for the Serb diaspora and is also distributed in the US and Australia. It will be tough for Blic Evropa to break its monopoly, but putting its cover price at around half that of Vesti will certainly help.

Ringier might be able to pull this off in part because it can put the weight, and low production costs, of a large media conglomerate behind the product. It has also found a good printer with experience in this sort of enterprise — in fact, the printer is quite possibly the inventor of the European diaspora daily: Hürriyet S.A. in Frankfurt.

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