Last Updated: March 23, 1999
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A note
from the president
ASNE’s International Committee has joined me enthusiastically this year
in a quest to awaken editors to new ideas and fresh motivations for covering
international news. The result is a first-rate handbook called “Bringing
the World Home.”
Our purpose is to improve international coverage in America’s daily
newspapers. Independent studies confirm coverage of the world has dropped
precipitously over the past two decades. This is especially true of community
and regional papers.
I began with the notion of broadening the definition of local news to
include the international connections to the community. Readers today know
that the global marketplace affects their jobs, their pay, their neighborhoods
and even what they can buy at Wal-Mart. The world also is part of their
lives in ways they don’t realize, yet many newspapers are not giving them
the depth, the explanation and the context they expect from a newspaper.
The handbook, subtitled “Showing Readers Their Local Connections” and
to be distributed at our San Francisco convention, provides helpful, practical
techniques for doing exactly that — connecting readers’ lives in useful
and relevant ways to the world. It also offers much more.
It reviews reader interest in international news. Surprisingly, six
of 10 readers are “highly interested” according to a recent Knight Ridder
study. The study sees world coverage as an opportunity for newspapers.
Other media, from network television to news magazines, have significantly
reduced their international commitments.
The handbook offers a game plan for reinvigorating international coverage.
Use the research, it suggests, to get buy-in from both the newsroom and
the business side. Then begin with a community inventory of international
contacts, connections and activity in the local area.
The inventory should be accompanied by a map showing locations of immigrant
neighborhoods, foreign students and educational exchange programs, service
organizations with international outreach, churches engaged in overseas
activities, companies either owned by or doing business with foreign firms,
and so forth. Careful study of the map will generate good local story ideas.
The handbook suggests putting the community inventory on your Web site
and asking readers to add to it with precise contact names, phone numbers
and addresses. The resulting database should be searchable by regions,
topics, etc.
The handbook also suggests drawing up a list of your community’s 10
top international news priorities. This can serve as a heads-up for gatekeepers
as well as for The Associated Press.
These good ideas are just the beginning. The handbook goes into a wide
variety of subjects related to international coverage — not to mention
good journalism.
For example, it tells how to put together a meaningful foreign briefs
package and then offers this remarkably sensible format from Matt Winkler,
editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News Service, the financial news service,
on how to write a brief:
“The lead is clearly what and why (the ‘theme’). The second paragraph
must ratify the lead ... provide the authority that establishes why you
should be reading the story. Typically, the second paragraph can be a quotation
from a recognized authority, making it clear that this story is worth taking
seriously. The third paragraph is what’s at stake, why you should care,
why the readers should be interested. And then the fourth paragraph is
the typical laundry list of detail that establishes the factual basis of
the story. ...”
Matt says this format is used for the top of every story on his wire,
no matter how long.
Wire editors are told how to select stories, but the handbook suggests
someone from the local news side with international interests monitor the
wire with an eye for local ties, especially that special story with potential
for local development.
To assist this process, the AP has instituted a weekly “international
calendar” to give editors a heads-up on important upcoming events overseas
and why they are seen as important. It runs on Friday afternoons.
There are suggestions and examples for developing your own international
stories. A classic was The Oregonian’s recent “french fry” story. It followed
the route of a french fry from a seed in Canada to potato farms in the
Northwest to an Indonesian processing plant aboard a Russian tanker for
eventual consumption at a McDonald’s in Singapore.
An interesting study of how 10 representative newspapers are covering
the world also is included. Large papers, it turns out, are doing much
better at finding local links than are smaller papers, even though it’s
the smaller papers that tend to live by the mantra “local, local, local.”
Seaton, ASNE president, is editor-in-chief of The Manhattan (Kan.)
Mercury.
