One of the easiest ways to learn a language isto use it actively. I’m used to doing that by reading a publication in the language I’m studying at that time. While I was following the German course, I was frequently in the IMS store buying the german C’t magazine. I tried Der Spiegel, but the heavy language couldn’t really motivate me to read on. With a computer magazine, that problem didn’t really exist.
At the moment I’m following an English conversation course, which means we talk a lot. For that, my subscription to The Economist comes in handy. Earlier, I used to read Business Week, but a few years back publisher McGraw-Hill decided to stop the publication of the European and Asian print editions, and following that it became a bit too US-centric for my tastes. Hence my switch to The Economist, where the editors succeed in providing a balanced overview of what happened in the world, even without regional editions. Sadly, at least one of the editors is a convinced euro-sceptic, which translates itself in a column blowing up some parts of european politics out of proportion and making fun of ut.
The perfect magazine doesn’t exist, that’s true. To my great surprise, I saw today that The Economist is offering an Audio Edition since a few weeks. Gone are the days when only best-selling autors were distributed on a multitude of audio cd’s, enabling the people stuck in trafic to follow the adventures of Harry Potter or Dan Brown. The Economist now offers a weekly
free download in mp3 format for subscribers of the print edition where professional actors read most of the articles. My english accent is looking forward to it, and I can imagine some of these might come in handy during our english conversation class too.
This seems to me the logical follow-up of the multi-channel approach that has been in use with most of the news-related publishers for years. A publication by one copywriter can be published through multiple channels, whether it is paper, the web or in spoken form. Web and paper are used in the same way : you read them. The only difference for the end-user is that he’s reading from paper or from a screen. The audio edition serves a totally different sense, and potentially allows The Economist to be ‘consumed’ in new ways, like in the car. Hopefully this takes off, because I’ll be downloading the audio edition in a moment to start working on my english accent.
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