Another one of my longtime soapboxes, and its interesting to see E&P support the idea that foreign events matter to your local readers:, in this excerpt from a Dec 1 2006 editorial:
Newspapers are transfixed by the notion that their many and varied problems will surely fade away if their printed and digital pages fill up with content that is "local, local, local" — always repeated three times, as if it were a Rosicrucian invocation.
There's a real logic behind this latest industry fad, of course. Newspapers beyond all doubt own the local news franchise, and no other medium can easily take it away. It is an invaluable strategic advantage.
But, as usual, newspapers desperate for The Answer to their woes are in danger of taking the local-news imperative too far. Reporting of international events is jettisoned to make room for Wednesday's lunch menu at Grover Cleveland Junior High. David Geffen, the entertainment billionaire who along with the supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle thinks it would be really cool to own the Los Angeles Times, intends, as the online media site The First Post put it, "to dump the international pretensions of the newspaper and focus on L.A. Basin affairs."
That's so totally an awesome plan.
Never mind that readers in L.A., and New York, and Nebraska live in a globalized world where Windows help calls are answered in Bangalore. Shiny-faced Ohioans with new engineering degrees find work in the Celtic Tiger economy of Ireland, the land their families left four generations ago. Mothers sob in Brooklyn when family news arrives from such once-exotic datelines as Mosul or Basra or Tikrit.
Once upon a time, newspapers of all sizes knew their duties included explaining the world at large to their readers. Even now, some of the most active participants in global press-freedom organizations publish family newspapers in Somerset, Pa., and Manhattan, Kan.
Certainly, not every newspaper needs to field a corps of correspondents abroad. But they should understand that "foreign" these days is local. Immigrants populate not just in the traditional neighborhoods of big cities, but the hog-butchering small towns of Iowa and the textile-spinning mills of Dixie. Global markets and fierce global competition are payday issues for local readers.
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