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Inhalt
| Lithuanian Newspapers |
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| Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira | |
| 2007.07.20 12.48 | |
        I noticed this same thing the last time I flew FlyLAL to Lithuania in 2003, but for some reason it struck me especially earlier this month when I flew from Gatwick to Vilnius and back: Lithuanians read lots of newspapers. FlyLAL gives out free copies of Lithuanian dailies on their flights, and on one of my flights this summer, by the time I boarded the flight, all the newspapers were gone.The FlyLAL flight is already surreal by itself, from the hot pink uniforms worn by all the staff, to the real estate sticker ads clumsily stuck on the overhead compartment doors. The stewardesses pass out menus and sell beer by the half-litre can. People show little respect for either the "no cell phones" rule or the "wait until the plane has come to a complete halt" rule. And, of course, everything is in Lithuanian, including "FlyLAL," which is very, very hard for Lithuanians to pronounce. But what sticks out most for me is that everyone is reading newspapers. Over the course of the flight back to London, my rowmates* blazed through issues of Vakaro žinios, Lietuvos rytas, and other papers. Others finished not only reading the papers, but also started to go at work on the various crossword puzzles. Imagine sitting on a flight from Chicago to New York, where everyone is reading newspapers, to get a sense of how odd this phenomenon is. In fact, I'm not sure when the last time I saw someone other than I read a newspaper on a domestic flight (and, even so, usually I only buy the NYT for a crossword to occupy me or a Boston Globe to get homesick). I suspected that the reason for this massive influx of print culture on FlyLAL was the result of the newspapers' being free, but then I read: 2005 metais vienam šalies gyventojui per metus teko 64,2 egzemplioriai laikraščių - kiek daugiau nei 2004 (63) ar 2000-aisiais (56,3) metais.What's interesting is that if you take the number of newspapers sold in the US daily (55 million), multiply by the number of days in a year, and divide by the US population, you get about 66.4 newspapers per American, per year. In other words, if there is a difference in newspaper readership, it's not visible in these back-of-an-envelope numbers. Yet I've never seen as high a percentage of people on a US-based flight (or even on the el, with its abundant, free RedEyes) reading newspapers as I did on FlyLAL. As for what everyone was reading about—that is a story for the next article. * My rowmates were friends who spoke to me in crystal clear Lithuanian, but between themselves spoke what could best be described as 50/50 Russian and Lithuanian. I'm still getting used to how Russian is used in Lithuania, but the way these guys flipped from language to language with each other was astonishing. |