Would the NY Times European edition (the newspaper formerly known as the Herald Tribune) be based in Paris if they were building it from scratch? Honestly, I can barely see Paris cracking the top five, and that’s dependent on how you think about Moscow as a European city. If a US paper were building a European edition from scratch, the top four cities would probably be London (financial capital, semi-common language, downside: competing head-on with the FT), Brussels (European capital, NATO, downside: almost as dull as its reputation), Berlin (capital of EU’s most important country, history always good for stories, downside: bad airport), Frankfurt (ECB, financial capital of EU’s most important city, downside: also almost as dull as its reputation), and only then places like Paris, Rome or Moscow. Which is a long way of saying, look to the institutional history rather than reason to discover why Berlin, Bogota, Jerusalem.

Then it gets tricky. I know Brussels is the “capital” of Europe, but I’m sure you could have someone in Paris, London or Berlin do just as good a job, with the advantage of being in a major capital, besides. Pick one of the above.

Finally, for a US paper you probably do need a Middle East bureau. Is Beirut a better vantage point than Jerusalem? Than Cairo? I’m agnostic. Non-US media could possibly put Delhi or Mumbai higher in the priorities. I remember in my WEF days the surprise that Americans always — and I mean always, no matter where they were on the political spectrum — put the Middle East at the top of their foreign policy agenda. Not China, not Russia, certainly not Africa or Latin America. Rightly or wrongly, for much of the rest of the world the Middle East is not seen as so central, to the exclusion of other concerns.

I’m shocked you don’t include anywhere in Latin America, Felix.

What would your three be? I can think of three Bs alone which would be better: Beijing, Brussels, and Beirut.