When will there be good news?

When will there be good news? It's the title of a crime novel written by Kate Atkinson, featuring Scottish detective Jackson Brodie. I read it a few years ago. It's also a question I ask Mr VV every morning over breakfast: "Found any good news yet?" The answer is always in the negative. It's been this way since the covid pandemic began, well actually before that, since 24 June 2016, in fact. We used to follow the news from the UK, but nowadays we can't bear the Today programme or PM, and the Channel 4 news is a distant memory. We couldn't listen to them even when we were temporarily living in the country. Usually, I have a quick trawl through the headlines of the Guardian, accessed mostly via my Facebook newsfeed. However, much as the covid stats are grim, they're not really relevant to us here in France. Hence, the other day I decided to start exploring French news. It's time to find out what's actually going on around us, and it'll help my project of improving my language skills, too.

As a start, I decided to just add a few more sources to my Facebook, so that snippets would pop up in my newsfeed. All the mainstream news outlets have social media pages, and Apps too, though some are subscriptions. Initially, I've just chosen the three "newspapers of record" - major players, with high(er) standards of journalism. They're akin to the New York Times and The Guardian and Telegraph. Le Monde is said to be the most trusted national newspaper; it has a social liberal/democrat editorial stance. Le Figaro is France's oldest national daily, founded in 1826, and has the largest circulation. It's editorial stance is said to be centre-right. On the other hand, Liberation has strong centre left leanings, having links to the 1968 unrest. It was founded in 1973 by, amongst others, Jean-Paul Satre. Probabky the nearest equivalent to The Guardian. 

Reading is probably my strongest language skill, so I need to add some listening practice too. The choice is overwhelming. We usually listen to radio via Alexa. The local France Bleu station is La Rochelle. It's good for background practice - just listening to the intonation, dipping in and out whilst doing a bit of housework and, of course, some French pop music. The dogs like it, too, when we're out. Another radio station I'll be looking out for is RFI, Radio France International, which also has some good language learning modules.

Currently, we've not got an operational TV for broadcast programmes, though all we need to do is buy an aerial! Hopefully, next year we'll buy a smart TV but for the moment it's just used for our evening dvd (yes, people do still watch dvds). In the past, back in the Limousin, our evening routine always included the 19-20 news on France 3 Limousin; half an hour of local news, followed by half an hour national. We also watched BFMTV, a rolling news channel and France 24, which broadcasts in four languages including English. Nowadays, all these also broadcast on the Internet, so I'm planning to dip in via the tablet every day.

When it comes to specific language learning the media offers plenty of assistance. TV5 has some great French language modules at different levels, with a newsclip and accompanying quizzes to check comprehension. Another site I've bookmarked for the new year is Newsinslowfrench. This is a subscription based site, accessible across all devices, again offering daily news reports at different levels from beginner to advanced. There's the offer of a seven day free trial, which is quite tempting as the site includes a meditation course in French.