Author: Felipe T. Edwards
Published: August 04, 1998
Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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International news

The end of the Cold War has diminished readers’ appetite for news outside their country, no matter what country that may be

The phenomenon of using less international news is by no means limited to the United States. Chilean editors face the same challenge.

In the months and years before the Dayton peace accords were signed, the following scene was played out regularly during our front-page conferences: as news editor, I would argue in favor of a piece on Bosnia, fully expecting groans from my colleagues around the table. I was seldom disappointed.

"It’s important; we can’t ignore a civil war in Europe; the same forces sparked World War I," I would argue.

"No one understands the Balkans; it’s too far away; our readers don’t care," they would respond.

"But how can they care if we don’t tell them about it?" I’d retort.

Back and forth we would go for several minutes, when eventually one side would give up ... until the next day.

Getting foreign news into our paper is never a simple process, even though our publisher is committed to bringing the outside world to readers. Armed with that resolve, our job as editors is to make the international pieces as interesting to readers as possible.

Here’s how we’ve approached the problem.

• Where possible, localize. It may not be original, but it works. We look for a local angle to any foreign story. In the case of Bosnia, that meant considering the interests of a substantial Croatian community living in Chile.

Less apparent was that as the war dragged on it spurred the growth of a fledgling berry-growing industry as the former Yugoslavia had been a major raspberry producer for Europe.

Sometimes an overseas story has an even larger impact at home. That was the case in May when an FAA directive called for the inspection of older versions of the Boeing 737. An important story in the U.S., no doubt, but in Chile that order grounded 16 of the 36 planes used on flights within our borders, stranding 2,400 passengers. It led the paper that day.

• Explain, explain, explain. A foreign story localized is no longer foreign. For those that cannot be made local, we strive to tell readers why a subject is in the paper.

It’s unrealistic to expect readers to be fascinated by Indonesian riots, European monetary union or the U.S. primaries if the players, their motives, and problems involved are not made clear. This is particularly true if, as is generally the case, the newspaper is the second or third source of major international events, after radio and television.

With that in mind, the editor of our foreign desk has gone far beyond traditional coverage based strictly on wire service copy. Each of his pages features at least one major analysis piece. The material is ordered from a stringer, bought from a syndicate, or prepared by his staff using information and opinions available on the Internet and from local academic and diplomatic sources.

Any story that plays for three or more days will have one or several of these prepared for them, often with that day’s events added as a sidebar. Readers like the background and perspective that these stories give them. We know that because they’ve told us.

• Listen to the readers. We’ve hired a polling firm to call about 100 subscribers every weekday morning asking them to rate that day’s edition for us. They’ve all agreed to participate, and are called about twice a month for their opinions.

They are asked to evaluate each story of the front page as very interesting, somewhat interesting, or not at all interesting to them, and to give the reasons for their opinions. The results of these surveys for a given morning edition are available at the news meeting that same afternoon. With that data in hand we can tell that, for instance, the stalled Middle East peace talks no longer hold our readers’ attention but that they are very troubled and interested in the nuclear explosions on the Indian subcontinent.

There is a danger in turning this last tool into a print version of the Nielsen ratings. Readers, after all, buy us for our judgment, not just to be told what they want to hear. Nevertheless, it is useful to know when a running story is no longer absorbing to them or when our opinions clash strongly with theirs.